Science Fiction Short Stories
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: sf; short fiction
Description: An assortment of science fiction stories and novelettes from the pen of pulp author Arthur Leo Zagat, with texts collected from Project Gutenberg and Roy Glashan's Library. 1: The Great Dome on Mercury 2: When the Sleepers Woke 3: The Land Where Time Stood Still 4: The Lanson Screen 5: Flight Of The Silver Eagle 6: Lost In Time 7: The Cavern Of The Shining Pool 8: The Green Ray 9: The Two Moons Of Tranquillia 10: No Escape from Destiny

SCIENCE FICTION

SHORT STORIES

Arthur Leo Zagat

2020

Contents

1: The Great Dome on Mercury

2: When the Sleepers Woke

3: The Land Where Time Stood Still

4: The Lanson Screen

5: Flight Of The Silver Eagle

6: Lost In Time

7: The Cavern Of The Shining Pool

8: The Green Ray

9: The Two Moons Of Tranquillia

10: No Escape from Destiny

______________________

Text files sourced from Project Gutenberg, and Roy Glashan's Libray

1: The Great Dome on Mercury

Astounding Stories April 1932

Trapped in the great dome, Darl valiantly defends Earth's outpost against the bird-man of Mars and his horde of pigmy henchmen.

DARL THOMAS mopped the streams of perspiration from his bronzed face and lean-flanked, wiry body, nude save for clinging shorts and fiber sandals. "By the whirling rings of Saturn," he growled as he gazed disconsolately at his paper-strewn desk. "I'd like to have those directors of ITA here on Mercury for just one Earth-month. I'll bet they wouldn't be so particular about their quarterly reports after they'd sweated a half-ton or so of fat off their greasy bellies. 'Fuel consumption per man-hour.': Now what in blazes does that mean? Hey, Jim!" He swiveled his chair around to the serried bank of gauge-dials that was Jim Holcomb's especial charge, then sprang to his feet with a startled, "What's the matter?"

The chunky, red-haired control-man was tugging at a lever, his muscles bulging on arms and back, his face white-drawn and tense. "Look!" he grunted, and jerked a grim jaw at one of the dials. The long needle was moving rapidly to the right. "I can't hold the air pressure!"

"Wow, what a leak!" Darl started forward. "How's it below, in the mine?"

"Normal. It's the Dome air that's going!"

"Shoot on the smoke and I'll spot the hole. Quick, man!"

"Okay!"

Thomas' long legs shot him out of the headquarters tent. Just beyond the entrance flap was one of the two gyrocopters used for flying within the Dome. He leaped into the cockpit and drove home the starter-piston. The flier buzzed straight up, shooting for the misted roof.

The Earthman fought to steady his craft against the hurricane wind, while his gray eyes swept the three-mile circle of the vault's base. He paled as he noted the fierce speed with which the white smoke-jets were being torn from the pipe provided for just such emergencies. His glance followed the terrific rush of the vapor. Big as a man's head, a hole glared high up on the Dome's inner surface. Feathered wisps of tell-tale vapor whisked through it at blurring speed.

"God, but the air's going fast," Darl groaned. The accident he had feared through all the months he had captained Earth's outpost on Mercury had come at last. The Dome's shell was pierced! A half-mile high, a mile across its circling base, the great inverted bowl was all that made it possible for man to defy the white hell of Mercury's surface. Outside was an airless vacuum, a waste quivering under the heat of a sun thrice the size it appears from Earth. The silvered exterior of the hemisphere shot back the terrific blaze; its quartz-covered network of latticed steel inclosed the air that all beings need to sustain life.

Darl tugged desperately at the control-stick, thrust the throttle over full measure. A little more of this swift outrush and the precious air would be gone. He caught a glimpse of the Dome floor beneath him and the shaft-door that gave entrance to the mine below. Down there, in underground tunnels whose steel-armored end-walls continued the Dome's protection below the surface, a horde of friendly Venusians were laboring. If the leak were not stopped in a few minutes that shaft door would blow in, and the mine air would whisk through the hole in its turn. Only the Dome would remain, a vast, rounded sepulcher, hiding beneath its curve the dead bodies of three Earthmen and the silent forms of their Venusian charges.

Darl's great chest labored as he strove to reach the danger spot. Invisible fingers seemed to be clamped about his throat. His eyes blurred. The gyrocopter was sluggish, dipped alarmingly when it should have darted, arrow-like, to its mark. With clenched teeth, the Terrestrian forced the whirling lifting vanes to the limit of their power. They bit into the fast thinning air with a muffled whine, raised the ship by feet that should have been yards.

By sheer will he forced his oxygen-starved faculties to function, and realized that he had reached the wall. He was drifting downward, the hole draining the Dome's air was five feet above him, beyond his reach. The driven vanes were powerless to stem the craft's fall.

One wing-tip scraped interlaced steel, a horizontal girder, part of the vault's mighty skeleton. Darl crawled along the wing, dragging with him a sheet of flexible quartzite. The metal foil sagged under him and slanted downward, trying like some animate thing to rid itself of the unwonted burden. He clutched the beam, hung by one leg and one arm as his craft slid out from beneath him. The void below dragged at him. He put forth a last tremendous spurt of effort.

Two thousand feet below, Jim Holcomb, dizzy and gasping, manipulated the controls frenziedly, his eyes fastened on the dropping pressure-gauge. From somewhere outside the tent a dull thud sounded. "Crashed! Darl's crashed! It's all over!" Hope gone, only the instinct of duty held him to his post. But the gauge needle quivered, ceased its steady fall and began a slow rise. Jim stared uncomprehendingly at the dial, then, as the fact seeped in, staggered to the entrance. "That's better, a lot better," he exclaimed. "But, damn it, what was that crash?"

The headquarters tent was at one edge of the circular plain. Jim's bleary eyes followed the springing arch of a vertical girder, up and up, to where it curved inward to the space ship landing lock that hung suspended from the center of the vaulted roof. Within that bulge, at the very apex, was the little conning-tower, with its peri-telescope, its arsenal of ray-guns and its huge beam-thrower that was the Dome's only means of defense against an attack from space. Jim's gaze flickered down again, wandered across the brown plain, past the long rows of canvas barracks and the derrick-like shaft-head. Hard by the further wall a crumpled white heap lay huddled.

"My God! It was his plane!" The burly Earthman sobbed as his ten-foot leaps carried him toward the wreck.

Darl was his friend as well as Chief, and together they had served the Interplanetary Trading Association, ITA, for years, working and fighting together in the wilds of the outer worlds. A thought struck him, even as he ran. "What in th' name o' Jupiter's nine moons stopped th' leak?" He glanced up, halted, his mouth open in amazement. "Well, I'm a four-tailed, horn-headed Plutonian if there ain't th' boy himself!"

Far up in the interlaced steel of the framework, so high that to his staring comrade he seemed a naked doll, Darl stood outstretched on a level beam, his tiny arms holding a minute square against the wall. Lucky it was that he was so tall and his arms so long. For the saving plate just lapped the upper rim of the hole, and stemmed the fierce current by only a half-inch margin.

The throbbing atmosphere machine in the sub-surface engine-room was replacing the lost air rapidly, and now the increasing pressure was strong enough to hold the translucent sheet against the wall by its own force. Jim saw the extended arms drop away. The manikin waved down to him, then turned to the shell again, as if to examine the emergency repair. For a moment Darl stood thus, then he was running along the girder, was climbing, ape-like, along a latticed beam that curved up and in, to swing down and merge with the bulge of the air-lock's wall.

"Like a bloomin' monkey! Can't he wait till I get him down with th' spare plane?"

But Darl wasn't thinking of coming down. Something he had seen through the translucent repair sheet was sending him to the look-out tower within the air-lock. Hand over hand he swung, tiny above that vast immensity of space. In his forehead a pulse still jumped as his heart hurried new oxygen to thirsty cells. He held his gaze steadily to the roof. A moment's vertigo, a grip missed by the sixteenth of an inch, the slightest failure in the perfect team-play of eye and brain, and rippling muscle, and he would crash, a half mile beneath, against hard rock.

At last he reached the curving side of the landing lock. But the platform at the manhole entrance jutted diagonally below him, fifteen feet down and twelve along the bellying curve. Darl measured the angle with a glance as he hung outstretched, then his body became a human pendulum over the sheer void. Back and forth, back and forth he swung, then, suddenly, his grasp loosened and a white arc flashed through the air.

Breathless, Jim saw the far-off figure flick across the chasm toward the jutting platform. He saw Darl strike its edge, bit his lip as his friend teetered on the rim and swayed slowly outward. Then Darl found his balance. An imperative gesture sent the watcher back to his post, his sorrel-topped head shaking slowly in wonderment.

Darl Thomas ran headlong up the staircase that spiralled through the dim cavern. "No mistake about it," he muttered. "I saw something moving outside that hole. Two little leaks before, and now this big one. There's something a lot off-color going on around here."

Quickly he reached the little room at the summit. He flung the canvas cover from the peri-telescope screen. Tempered by filters as it was the blaze of light from outside hit him like a physical blow. He adjusted the aperture and beat eagerly over the view-table.

Vacation jaunts and travel view-casts have made the moon's landscape familiar to all. Very similar was the scene Darl scanned, save that the barren expanse, pitted and scarred like Luna's, glowed almost liquid under the beating flame of a giant sun that flared in a black sky. Soundless, airless, lifeless, the tumbled plain stretched to a jagged horizon.

The Earthman depressed the instrument's eye, and the silvered outside of the Dome, aflame with intolerable light, swept on to the screen disk. The great mirror seemed alive with radiant heat as it shot back the sun's withering darts. The torrid temperature of the oven within, unendurable save to such veterans of the far planets as Darl and Jim Holcomb, was conveyed to it through the ground itself. The direct rays of the sun, nearer by fifty million miles than it is to Earth, would have blasted them, unprotected, to flaked carbon in an eye-blink.

An exclamation burst from Darl. A half-inch from the Dome's blazing arc, a hundred yards in actuality, the screen showed a black fleck, moving across the waste! Darl quickly threw in the full-power lens, and the image leaped life-size across the table. The black fleck was the shadow of a space-suited figure that lumbered slowly through the viscous, clinging footing. How came this living form, clad in gleaming silver, out there in that blast-furnace heat? In one of the space suit's claw-like hands a tube flashed greenly.

Darl's hand shot out to the trigger of the beam-thrower. Aimed by the telescope's adjustment, the ray that could disintegrate a giant space flier utterly flared out at his finger's pressure. Against the lambent brown a spot glowed red where the beam struck. But, warned by some uncanny prescience, the trespasser leaped aside in the instant between Thomas' thought and act. Before Darl could aim and fire again the foe had dodged back and was protected by the curve of the Dome itself.

Two white spots showed on either side of Darl's nostrils. His mouth was a thin white slit, his eyes gray marbles. Standing against the wall beside him was a space suit, mirror-surfaced and double-walled against the planet's heat. In a few moments he was encased within it, had snatched a pocket ray-gun from the long rack, and was through the door to the auxiliary air-lock. The air soughed out in response to his swift thrust at a lever, a second door opened, and he was on the outside, reeling from the blast of that inferno of light and heat.

For a moment the Earthman was dazzled, despite the smoked quartz eye-pieces in his helmet. Then, as his eyes grew used to the glare, he saw, far below, the erect figure of the stranger. The man was standing still, waiting. His immobility, the calm confidence with which he stood there, was insolently challenging. Darl's rage flared higher at the sight.

Scorning the ladder that curved along the Dome to the ground, he threw himself at the polished round side of the great hemisphere. With increasing speed he slid downward, the gleaming surface breaking only slightly the velocity of his fall. On Earth this would have been suicidal. Even here, where the pull of gravity was so much less, the feat was insanely reckless. But the heat-softened ground, the strength of his metal suit, brought Darl safely through.

He whirled to meet the expected onslaught of the interloper. The green tube was aimed straight at him! The Earthman started to bring his own weapon up when something exploded in his brain. There was a moment of blackness; then he was again clear-minded. But he could not move— not so much as the tiny twist of his wrist that would have brought his own weapon into play.

Frozen by this strange paralysis, Darl Thomas saw the giant figure approach. The apparition bent and slung him to its shoulder. Glowing walls rose about him, dimmed. The Terrestrian knew that he was being carried down into one of the myriad openings that honeycombed the terrain. The luminescence died; there was no longer light enough to penetrate to his helmet's darkened goggles.

Frantic questions surged through the captured Earthman's mind. Who was his captor? From where, and how, had he come to Mercury? Jim, Angus McDermott, and himself were the only Terrestrians on the planet; of that he was certain. Only one or two of the reptile-skinned Venusian laborers had sufficient intelligence to manipulate a space suit, and they were unquestionably loyal.

This individual was a giant who towered far above Darl's own six feet. The Mercurian natives— he had seen them when ITA's expedition had cleaned out the burrows beneath the Dome and sealed them up— were midgets, the tallest not more than two feet in height. Whatever he was, why was the stranger trying to destroy the Dome? Apparently Thomas himself was not to be killed offhand: the jolting journey was continuing interminably. With enforced patience the Earthman resigned himself to wait for the next scene in this strange drama.

IN THE HEADQUARTERS tent Jim's usual grin was absent as he moved restlessly among the switches and levers that concentrated control of all the Dome's complex machinery. "Darl's been gone a devilish long time," he muttered to himself. "Here it's almost time for shifts to change and he's not back yet."

A bell clanged, somewhere up in the mass of cables that rose from the control board. For the next ten minutes Holcomb had no time for worry as he rapidly manipulated the innumerable wheels and handles in accord with the vari-colored lights that flickered on a huge ground-glass map of the sub-Mercurian passages. On the plain outside there was a vast rustling, a many-voiced twittering and squeaking that was not quite bird-like in tone. Through the opened tent-flap one could see the stream of Venusian workers, their work-period ended, pouring out of the shaft-head and filing between the ordered ranks of others whose labors were about to begin.

They were queer-looking specimens, these gentle, willing allies of the Earthmen. Their home planet is a place of ever-clouded skies and constant torrential rains. And so the Venusians were amphibians, web-footed, fish-faced, their skin a green covering of horny scales that shed water and turned the sharp thorns of their native jungles. When intrepid explorers discovered in the mazes of Mercury's spongy interior the surta that was so badly needed as a base material for synthetic food to supply Earth's famine-threatened population, it was to these loyal and amiable beings that ITA's engineers turned for workers who could endure the stifling heat of the underground workings.

The tent-flap was thrust aside, and a hawk-nosed Scot came sleepily in, to be enthusiastically greeted by Jim.

"Hello, you old Caledonian. 'Bout time you showed up."

The newcomer fixed the speaker with a dour gaze. "An' why should I commence my tour o' dooty befair the time?"

"Because your chief, Mr. Darl Thomas, decided that he's a filliloo bird or somethin', flew to his little nest up top, an' forgot to come down again."

"Is this ain o' your jests, James Holcomb? I eenquire mairly that I may ken when to laugh."

"It's no joke, Mac. Last I see o' him he's skippin' around the roof like he has a buzzin' propeller stuck to his shoulder blades. He lights on th' air-lock platform, pops inside, an' goes dead for all I know."

From his bony legs to his scrawny neck the Scotchman's angular body, as nearly nude as that of the others, radiated the doubt that was expressed in every seam and wrinkle of his hatchet face.

"That's straight, Angus, may I kiss a pink-eared vanta if it ain't. Here's what happened." The bantering grin disappeared from Jim's countenance as he detailed the events that had preceded Darl's vanishing. "That was two hours ago," he concluded, "and I've been getting pretty uneasy about him."

"Why did na ye call me, so that ain o' us micht eenvestigate?"

"Hell. Darl wasn't born yesterday, he can take care of himself. Besides, your last shift was pretty strenuous, an' I thought I'd let you sleep. No tellin' what might happen next; this forsaken place has been givin' me the jim-jams lately."

"Your conseederation is touching, but— " A scratching at the door, accompanied by a high squeak, interrupted him.

To Jim's shouted "Come in," there entered a Venusian, whose red rosette fastened to the green scales of his skin marked him an overseer. In the thread-like fingers of his hand he held a time-sheet, but the nervous pulsing of his gill-membranes caused Holcomb to exclaim anxiously: "What's wrong, Ran-los? No accident, I hope?"

The shrill combination of squeaks and twitterings that came from the man-reptile's toothless mouth meant nothing to the Scot, but Jim's last service had been on Venus and he had gained a working knowledge of the language. Finally the interchange was ended, and Ran-los bowed himself out. Jim turned to his companion.

"There's some more queer stuff for you, Angie. Just before shift-change, Ran-los heard odd sounds from the other side of the barrier at the end of gallery M-39. Says they seemed like signals o' some kind. He's a wise old bird and if he's worried about something it's damn well worth lookin' into. I don't know whether to find out first what's happened to Darl, or— "

Again there was an interruption; this time from the usually silent radio-communication set in the far corner. Jim leaped to the instrument and snapped on the head-set. Angus leaned over him, watching his intent face.

Faintly, as from an immense distance, came the thin whistle of space-radio. "S-W-A ... S-W-A ... S-W-A...." The general attention signal for all Earth's far-flung outposts from Jupiter to Mercury! The signal was coming from "M-I-T-A," the Earth company's home station on the Moon, outside the Heaviside layer. "S-W-A ... S-W-A ... M-I-T-A ... M-I-T-A." Again the signal rose and fell.

Jim reached for the sending key and pounded out his acknowledgement: "K; M-E-R ... K; M-E-R ... K; M-E-R." He listened again, heard Venus answer, and Jupiter. Across five hundred million miles of space ITA men were responding to the roll-call of Earth. A reminiscent smile crossed Jim's face as he recognized the stuttering fist of Rade Perrin, on Eros. Rade always sent as if he were afraid the instrument would snap at his fingers.

M-I-T-A was signalling again, and now came the message: "S-W-A. All trading posts, mines and colonies are warned to prepare for possible attack. The Earth Government has just announced the receipt of an ultimatum from— " A raucous howl cut across the message and drowned it out. The siren blast howled on and on, mocking Jim's straining ears. "Well I'll be— Interference! Deliberate blanketing! The rats! The— " He blazed into a torrent of profanity whose imaginativeness was matched only by its virulence.

Mac was clutching his shoulder, stirred for once out of his vaunted "deegnity." "What is it, mon, what is it?"

"War, you bloody Scotchman, war! That's what it is!"

"War! Foosh, man, 'tis eempossible!"

"The hell it's impossible! Damn, and Darl not here! Take over, Mac; I've got to go up an' get him!"

In the meantime Thomas' helpless journey had come to an end. After an interminable descent in what to him had been pitch darkness, the giant who was carrying him halted. Darl had heard the whistling inrush of air into some lock, then the clanging of a door. He felt himself hurled to the ground. Fumbling hands tugged at him, drew off his space suit.

The dim light of the cavern, as the helmet was dragged from his head, hurt Darl's eyes. Salt sweat stung them. It was hot, hotter than the Dome, hot as it was in the surta mine, where only the nerveless Venusians could work for any length of time.

Darl struggled to focus his eyes on a blurred blue form that towered above him. He felt sharp claws scratch at him and realized that cords were being passed around his limp body. They cut tightly into his legs and his arms. Then he was staring at a tube in the hand of his captor. Its end glowed with a brilliant purple light, and he felt a flood of reawakened energy warm him. His head jerked up, he strained against the taut, strong fibers binding him. The paralysis was gone, but he was still helpless.

A husky, rumbling voice broke the silence. "I wouldn't struggle, Earthman, if I were you. Even should you get free I still have my ray-tube. And my little friends would ask nothing better than your body to play with."

Darl writhed to a sitting posture. Now he could see his mysterious abductor clearly. This eight-foot, blue-feathered individual, with curved beak and beady eyes glittering from his naked, repulsively wrinkled head, was a Martian! Despite the human shape of his body, despite his jointed limbs and thumbed hands, this denizen of the red planet resembled a vulture far more than he did any other Earth creature.

The Earthman's pride of race came to his rescue. "What's the game?" he growled. "Looking for trouble?" There was nothing in Darl's voice to show the fear that chilled him. Behind the Martian he could see vaguely a group of little yellow Mercurians.

"I'll ask all the questions here. And you'll answer them, too, if you're wise. Even your dull mind should comprehend that you are in my power."

Darl decided to proceed more cautiously. "What do you want from me?" he asked.

"I want," the Martian answered, "the recognition signal of Earth's space-ships."

"What!" The ejaculation burst from Darl's throat. This alien wanted the secret code, the watch-word that distinguished Earth's space ships, that gained for them free admittance to ITA's armed posts on the outer planets! This could mean only one thing, that the long rivalry, the ancient dispute between Earth and Mars was about to flare into open war. Any friendly visit from a foreign flier would be heralded by word from M-I-T-A. Thomas' face became a stony mask, covering the tumult of his mind.

"You understood. I want the Earth recognition signal at once— and after that, the surrender of the Dome." The very calmness of the husky tones was a threat.

"Never!"

"I warn you, Darl Thomas. It would be the better part of wisdom for you to yield willingly what I ask. You will give in eventually, and the means of persuasion I shall use will not be exactly— pleasant."

"You'll get nothing from me!"

The outlander's lidless eyes were filmed with a gray membrane. His head thrust forward, the feathered ruff beneath it bristled. Darl braced himself to withstand the swooping pounce that seemed imminent, the slash of the sharp beak. A burring rattle broke the momentary hush. The Martian relaxed, turned to the Mercurian from whom the sound had come and replied with staccato vibrance.

As the cave filled with a whirring tumult Darl had a chance to examine the Mercurian natives crowding around his prostrate body. They were little yellow midgets, ranging from eighteen inches to two feet in height. Half of their small stature was taken up by snouted heads, with saucer-like, crimson eyes, and long white tusks jutting from foam-flecked mouths. The trunks were globular. The spindling legs and thin arms ended in sharp claws. There was an impression of animal ferocity about these tiny beings that stamped them as utter savages.

His captor was speaking to the Earthman again, his horny beak parted in what might have been a grim smile. "My friends remind me that I promised you to them. They have not forgotten how you and your fellows drove them from their burrows."

Darl was suddenly cold, though the sweat still streamed from his bound body. An uncontrollable shudder took him as he saw what the diminutive claws of the midgets held. While the Dome was still an unfinished framework one of the Terrestrian artisans had somehow been isolated from his fellows. Thomas had been of the party that found what was left of him, and the memory was still a throbbing nightmare.

"Once more! Will you give me the recognition signal?"

Darl shook his head, and prayed for sudden death. The Martian spoke to the dwarfs. They started forward, saliva drooling from their tusks. Darl gritted his teeth. He would hold out as long as was humanly possible.

A shrill rhythmic whistle came from somewhere outside. The blue giant started and snapped something to the Mercurians. Then he turned to Darl. "I must leave you for a little while," he said. "You have till I return to change your mind." With a parting admonition to the savages he was gone through a side door that Thomas had not noticed before.

Grateful for the postponement, however short, of the inescapable ordeal, Darl took stock of his situation. He lay, firmly bound, on the gritty rock floor of a low-ceiled cave about twelve feet square. In one wall was a door of red metal. The portal through which the Martian had vanished was next to it. Darl repressed an exclamation when he saw the opposite wall. It was of solid metal, bluishly iridescent. That was beryllium steel, the alloy from which the barriers at the terminals of the surta mine were fashioned. He forced his head higher. There were the marks of the jointures, the weldings that he himself had made.

The discovery seemed only to emphasize the helplessness of his predicament. His faithful Venusians, Ran-los, Ta-ira, and the rest were just on the other side of the three-inch plate of toughened steel. Three inches— yet it might have been as many hundred miles for all the help they could give him.

The yellow pigmies were circling in a macabre dance, their crimson eyes turned always toward him, hate glowing from their crawling depths. The whistle beyond changed in character. Darl recognized it. It was a Martian space-radio, the code of which Earth scientists had never been able to decipher. The Mercurian circle tightened, the fetid smell of the dwarfs was overpowering. Low at first, then louder and louder came the rattling cacophony of their chant. It filled the confined space with an overpowering clamor.

Darl writhed again, rolling over and over till he had reached the barrier. The pigmies gave way before him; evidently they had been warned to keep their claws off. With his insteps Thomas could reach the helmet of his space suit, where it had been dropped against the wall. He drove it against the metal and the clangor of its striking reverberated through the chamber. Darl managed to regulate the sound. He was now hammering out double knocks, long and short, spaced in the dots and dashes of the Morse code. "H-E-L-P D-A-R-L H-E-L-P D-A-R-L H-E-L-P...."

It was like some scene out of a madman's dream, this dim-lit cavern with its circling, dancing pigmies, the human figure lying sidewise on the ground, the rattling, savage chant and the metallic tattoo of Darl's hopeless message. A diabolic orgy of weird sound and crisscrossing shadows.

It seemed hours that he pounded the helmet against the wall, hoping that the sound of it would be audible above the clamor of the midgets. His knees and hips were aching and numb, his leg ripped, almost to the bone by the sharp edges of the jagged floor. A sudden thought struck him. The fiber thongs that bound him were also rubbing against the rock. His flesh was terribly torn. Perhaps the thongs, too, had been frayed, weakened by the long continued friction.

He stopped the pounding signals and began to force his knees apart with all the power of his burly calves. The cords cut into his bulging muscles, cut into and through his skin. The veins stood out on his forehead, his neck was a corded pillar, his teeth bit through his lip as he stifled a scream of pain. Then, startlingly, the fibers snapped. His legs at least were free! He could fight, die fighting, and take these others with him into oblivion!

Darl leaped to his feet. Before the astounded natives realized what was up he was charging into their circle. A well aimed kick sent one crashing against the further wall. Another crunched against the rock. Then they were on him, a frothing wave of tiny furies. A score or more, they swarmed over him as a pack of African wild dogs swarms over a huge water-buffalo marked for the kill. Their claws scratched and tore, their sharp fangs stabbed into his flesh. His arms were still tightly bound to his sides, and he lashed out with his sandaled feet, swung his shoulders like battering rams, whirled in a dervish dance. Their brittle bones cracked under his hammer blows. They dropped from him like squashed flies. But, small as they were, he was terrifically outnumbered. By sheer weight of numbers they dragged him down, and piled on top of him as he lay, quivering and half-conscious, on the blood-soaked floor.

Through the blackness that welled and burst in his brain, one thought held. He had fooled the Martian, for in another instant the enraged savages, would kill him and the password to Earth's outposts would be safe. Already, he felt their fangs at his throat.

A whirring rattle cut through the turmoil like a whip-lash, and the heap of pigmies swiftly scattered. The man-bird from Mars was in the room. To Darl he was a blurred blueness from which glittered those two jet beads of eyes. As from a distance he heard a rumble, its meaning beating dully to him. "Not so easy, Thomas, not so easy. I want that signal, and by Tana, I'm going to have it."

The Earthman felt a current of cooler air. Instinctively he drew it into his lungs. It swept him up from the blackness that was closing in about him, brought him back to consciousness and despair. The chattering Mercurians crowded round to commence their interrupted orgy. "For the last time, Earthman, will you talk?"

Darl shook his head weakly and closed his eyes. In a moment—

Suddenly there was a crash of metal on metal. Another! The clangor of falling steel. Now someone was shouting, "Darl, Darl, are you alive?" All about him were shrill twitterings, squeaking calls, squeals and scutterings. Darl's nostrils stung with the odor of burned flesh. A door slammed....

He opened his eyes on a confused riot, saw Jim crouched, flashing ray-gun in hand. There was a hole in the barrier, and a mob of green-scaled Venusians were crowding through. Jim's ray caught the last Mercurian and the dwarf vanished in a cloud of acrid, greasy smoke.

"Thank God you've come!" Darl managed to gasp. Then cool blackness closed around him.

DARL THOMAS lay on a cot in the headquarters tent, swathed from head to foot in an inch-thick wrapping of bandages. Jim's theory was that if one bandage was good, two were better, and he had cleaned out the post's slender stock. The red-haired Earthman was seated at the cot's side, watching the taciturn Scot operating the control board. He was telling Darl of the stirring message from M-I-T-A, and of the blanketing interference that marred the completion of the message.

"I didn't know what to do first," he continued, "whether to go down below and find out what Ran-los was battin' about, or shoot up to you in the connin' tower with the message. Like the thick-head I am, I picked the wrong thing. I sure got the gimmicks when I found the look-out empty, an' a space suit an' ray-gun gone." Jim grinned mirthlessly. "I was runnin' around in circles. You were outside, God alone knows how long. Believe me, I had you crossed off the list! That left two of us. With a war on, somebody had to stand guard in the look-out, the control board here had to be watched, an' somebody else had to get below.

"I was just tryin' to figure out a way o' cuttin' myself in half when I thought o' Ran-los. For a Weenie he's got a heck of a lot of sense. I zoomed down, hauled him out o' his bunk, scooted back up, showed him how to work the peri-telescope an' the big beam-thrower, an' left him there on guard."

"Best thing you could have done." Darl's voice was muffled by the bandages in which his head, as well as the rest of his body, was swathed. "He's got a head on his shoulders, that bird."

"Somethin' told me to take a ray-gun down in the mine with me. I was just steppin' out o' the elevator when I caught your last signal; -L-P D-A-R-L was all I got, but it was enough. How you ever got the other side of the barrier had me wingin', but you were there right enough, and yellin' for help. Ran-los had been doin' some repairs on a head support an' his weldin' machine was still there. Takin' an awful chance on there bein' air on the other side, I butted it up against the wall, shot the flame against the steel, and when she was soft enough had some of the Weenies smash her in with sledge-hammers. First thing I see is you, stretched out in a pool o' blood, with a couple of those yellow imps just gettin' to work on you. I clipped them first— that gave the Martian a chance to get away. An' then— well, you know the rest."

"I owe you one for that, Jim. Too bad, though, the big fellow escaped; we'll hear from him again, or I don't know the breed. Wonder how he got on the planet."

"The sucker must 'a' stowed away on the last recruit ship from Venus, slipped in a case o' tools or somethin'. Mars has labor agents there, too, you know, for their farms on Ganymede."

"Possibly. He knew my name, and that I was chief here. He's rigged up an air-lock out there, though I can't figure out how he gets the air."

"That's easy. While I was repairin' the barrier I found a pipe runnin' through. He's been stealin' ours. Which, by the same token, is why he was punchin' holes in the Dome rather than down below, where he would have been safer from discovery."

"So that's it. Get anything more on the space-radio?"

"Nope. Angus has kept the ear-flaps on, but the ether is still jammed. Hey, what're you up to?"

Darl was swinging his bandaged body up from the cot that had been set up in the headquarters tent at his insistence. "Can't lie on my back," he panted, "with that devil loose on the planet. Lord knows what he's up to now. We're short-handed enough as it is."

He rose to his feet, staggering with weakness and loss of blood. But his indomitable will drove him on. "I'll take over the control board. Send Angus up to relieve Ran-los, and you get below and speed up production. Earth will need double quantities of surta for food, now that there's a war on."

Jim turned to convey the order to the Scot, but he whirled to the tent-flap instead as a riot of sound exploded outside. He tore aside the canvas, and now there was a burst of shrill, frightened Venusian cries, and a deeper, rattling chorus. Out on the Dome floor, pouring from the shaft-head in a panic torrent, came the Venusians. And among them, leaping, slashing, dragging them down, were countless little yellow men, their fangs and tusks and curving claws crimson with the blood of their victims.

"Darl, Mac, they've broken through! The Mercs have broken through!" The brown plain was a blood-spattered battlefield. Here and there little groups of the green men, braver than the rest, fought with spanner and hammer and whatever improvised weapon they may have found. "Come on, give 'em hell!" The three Earthmen dashed out, weapons in hand. But friend and foe were so intermingled that they could not use the devastating ray of their hand-guns. The fighting Venusians were vanishing under a tossing sea of yellow imps. And still the dwarfs poured forth from the mine entrance.

A blue form towered, far back, where all green had vanished, and only Mercurians were left. The Martian's beak opened in a rattling call. A group of hundreds of pigmies suddenly left the main fight, and came forward with short, swift steps. They dashed straight for the Earth trio and cut them off from the Venusians they were running to aid.

Side by side the three fought. Their weapons grew hot in their hands as the beams cut great swaths in the seething ranks. The attackers halted, gave back, then surged forward again as the roar of their alien commander lashed them on.

The Earthmen faced the frenzied throng. A cleared circle was still around them. Beyond, the Venusians were all down. The Mercurian mob was closing in, the Terrestrians' rays had lost half their range. In moments now the ray-guns would be exhausted.

"The plane!" Darl shouted. "Back to the plane, it's our only chance."

The gyrocopter that could carry them aloft, out of the rout, was fifty feet away. They fought through to it and reached it just as the last faint charge flashed from Mac's tube. Jim was at the controls, Darl smashed his useless projector into the chattering face of a dwarf that had leaped on the Scot's shoulders and dragged Angus into the cockpit.

The overloaded flier zoomed to the landing at the lofty air-lock's manhole and hovered as Darl and Angus slipped home the hooks that held it to the platform. "The spy has the Dome," Jim grunted, "but by God, he hasn't got us. We'll be safe in the lock up here, till help comes. And then— "

"Safe is it?" Angus broke in. "Mon, luik ye what those bairns fra hell are up to the noo."

A yellow tide was rising about the base of each of the latticed steel arches that vaulted to the Earthmen's refuge. On every side the dwarfs were climbing, were swarming up the walls in numbers so great that they concealed the metal beneath. Up, up they came, slowly but surely. And right in the center of the plain, ankle-deep in the torn fragments of the murdered Venusians, was the Martian, directing the attack.

Jim groaned. "I might've known he'd never let us get away. It's slow bells for us, I guess. Hey, where's Darl?"

"Gone weethin. No, guid losh, he's here!"

Darl appeared, his features pale and drawn, carrying an armful of ray-guns. "Grab these," he snapped. "We're not licked yet."

"Licked, hell!" Jim's roar reverberated. "We've just begun to fight!" The Scot was silent, but the battle light shone in his eyes. In another moment the Terrestrians were kneeling, were raking the roof girders as the mounting Mercurians came within range. Each had two ray-guns in his hands, and a little pile of extra tubes beside him. They fought silently, wasting not a single blast.

Six white rays flamed through the misty, humid air, and striking the teeming girders, swept them clean. A greasy, horrible smoke cloud gathered along the shell and drifted slowly down, till the concrete blocks from which the steel framework sprang were hidden in a black pall. Fighters, these three, true ITA men who had left memories of their battle-prowess on more than one wild planet! Gaunt-bodied demi-gods of war, they hurled crackling bolts of destruction from their perch at the Dome top. By hundreds, by thousands, the Mercurian pigmies vanished in dark vapor, or plunged, blackened corpses, into the fog that billowed below.

One by one the tubes were discharged and tossed down at the seething mob. The heaped weapons dwindled, and still the climbing hordes renewed themselves, came on in endless mounting streams to sure destruction. The open tunnel vomited forth a torrent of gibbering dwarfs. From the uttermost burrows of the planet the pigmies were flooding in at the call of the Martian who stood scatheless beneath and lashed them on with the strange dominance he held over them. The Earthmen fought on, endlessly, till they were sick of killing, nauseated with slaughter. And still the snouted, red-eyed imps came on.

Jim snatched up his last two ray-guns. Out of the corner of his eye he noted that Darl was using but one, the other, his last, was thrust into the chief's belt. He wondered at this, but a new spurt of yellow above the oily fog wiped the question from his lips. "Swallow that, you filthy lice! Hope you like the way it tastes!" His guns spouted death.

"I'm through!" The call came at last from McDermott. "Me too!" Jim Holcomb hurled his final, futile tubes down at the blue figure of the Mars man. A moment's hush held the trio. Then Jim flexed his great hands. "Well, these'll take care of a couple more o' them before I check in."

"No you don't," Darl barked, his face a graven image. "Inside with you. The lock will hold 'em off."

"Yeah? Look."

Thomas swung in the direction Jim was pointing. Rising above the murk, something glinted in the pale light. On the furthest upright a clumped group of climbing savages were struggling to drag up one of the welding machines, a long black hose snaking from its cylindrical bulk.

"They'll cut through the steel in fifteen minutes with that. The bloody bugger ain't missin' a trick."

"Inside, I tell you." Darl's crisp tone of command brooked no denial. The three crowded into the cool recesses of the manmade aerie. Angus slammed the steel door shut. Even if by some miracle the Dome wall should be pierced and the air in the main vault dissipated into outer space, this air-tight compartment hung from the hemisphere's roof would remain, a last refuge, till the atmosphere within had become poisonous through the Earthmen's slow breathing. But the Martian had anticipated Darl's final move. The oxy-hydrogen jet of the welding machine the dwarfs were hoisting would make short work of their final defense.

From the conning-tower above Ran-los called excitedly. Through all the long battle the Venusian had remained steadfast at the peri-telescope, scanning the vacant terrain outside, and the heavens. As Darl and Jim dashed for the stairs Mac ran after them, crying out, "What did he say, mon?"

"Space ship in sight," Darl flung over his shoulder as he reached the upper landing.

"Praise be! Noo the haythan weel get his desairts!"

"Yeah, maybe— if it's an Earth ship. But we won't be here to see it."

Jim's red head was bending over the peri-telescope view-screen. "She's still thirty thousand miles away. Give her a speed of fifteen per second— she'll have to slow up to land, can't make it under forty-five minutes. By then we'll be in little pieces. It took me ten minutes to burn through the barrier when I rescued Darl, and it won't take the Mercs any longer to get at us."

Darl was very sober as he looked on with narrowed eyes. Against a background of velvet black, gold spangled, the slim space-traveler showed. The sun's rays caught her, and she was a tiny silver fish in the boundless void.

"Luik ye, mon, luik ye!" Angus, fairly dancing with excitement, elbowed Darl aside. "She's from Airth, richt enow!" At the nose of the oncoming flier a rapid succession of colored lights had flashed, the recognition signal that should give her safe access to the Dome. Again there was a coruscation of coded flashes. "She's a battle cruiser, what's mair!" the Scot exclaimed.

Darl sprang to the keyboard that manipulated the signal lights from the Dome's roof. "No use," he said, after a short while. "The Martian has cut off the current from the dynamos. I can't warn the ship." He made a hopeless gesture.

Jim looked at him wonderingly. "Warn 'em? What for? Even if we are all dead when she reaches here, at least she'll clean up the Mercs, and retake the Dome for Earth."

"Don't you see it? When the Mars man has once blasted his way in here and disposed of us, he'll be ready for the space ship. Her captain can't suspect anything wrong. He must have left Earth at the time of the ultimatum, and would easily get here before any ship could be sent out from Mars. He'll come on till he's within range of the beam-thrower, and the Martian will aim, press the trigger and the Earth ship and her crew of a half a thousand brave lads will be star-dust."

"Oh God!" Jim was white-faced. "Isn't there anything we can do? Maybe if he doesn't get our all-clear signal he'll sheer off." This was clutching at straws.

"Why should he? He must know how short-handed we are, and will simply think we're not on watch, or that our signal lights are out of order. Matter of fact, if he were at all suspicious he should be alternating his course right now— and he hasn't. Look."

Seemingly motionless, but really splitting the ether with terrific speed, the warship was coming straight on to garrison the beleaguered post. She had never wavered from her straight course for the Dome. The little group was silent, watching the help that was coming at last, coming too late.

From below there came a thunder of sound. Jim slid down the stairs. An irregular disk on the wall was glowing cherry-red from the heat of the blow-torch without, and the metal was quivering under the Mercurian's sledge-hammer blows. "Darl's right," he almost sobbed as he gazed helplessly. "They'll be through in no time. The Dome's gone, we're gone, the space ship's gone!"

"Let me pass, Jim." Thomas' quiet voice sounded behind him. Holcomb turned. His leader was in a space suit, the helmet still unfastened.

"Blazes! Where the devil are you going?"

"Here, cover me with this till I reach the gyrocopter, then get back quick, and seal the air-lock." Darl thrust into Jim's hand the ray-gun he had previously reserved. "There's only one way to kill off the Martian and his mob. I'm taking it."

Suddenly Jim Holcomb understood. "No, Darl, no— you can't do it! Not you! Let me go! I'm just a dumbhead. Let me go!"

"Thanks, Jimmy, but it's my place." Darl's voice was low, and very calm. "I was in charge, and I lost the Dome. If I can save the boys on the ship, and you two, it's the least I can do. Good-by, old man. Give my regards to Earth."

Thomas' face was gray-white. The thick bandages that still swathed him, Jim glimpsed them through the open neckpiece of the suit, gave him the semblance of a mummy. The helmet clicked shut. Swallowing a lump that rose in his throat, Jim pulled open the door. A wave of Mercurians surged in, to be seared into nothingness by his weapon. He was in the doorway, his ray sweeping the platform clear.

Darl was out now, stepping into the flier that still hung by its hooked moorings. Jim caught a flash of blue and looked up. The Martian was hanging to a girder just above, his green tube pointing straight at Darl. A white ray spurted from Jim's gun. The Martian's weapon and the hand that held it vanished in the sizzling blast. The plane was loose! Jim leaped inside the air-lock, slammed the steel door shut, clamped it, and sprang for the quartz peer-hole.

Darl's gyrocopter was diving on a long slant for the Dome wall. Faster and faster it went, till all Jim could see was a white streak in the smoky dimness. And now he could see the vast interior, the teeming plain, the dwarf-festooned girders and roof-beams. He stood rigid, waiting breathlessly. Then the plane struck— fair in the center of a great panel of quartz. The wall exploded in a burst of flying, shattered splinters. A deafening crash rocked the Dome.

Jim clung to his port-hole, tears rolling down his cheeks, unashamed. The plane, and Darl, vanished. Jim saw the black smoke masses whirl through the jagged hole in the Dome's wall as the air burst out in a cyclonic gust. He saw the vast space filled with falling Mercurians, saw a blue form plunge down and crash far below. He knew that in all that huge hemisphere, and in the burrows beneath it, there was no life save himself, and Angus, and the faithful Ran-los. For only in this compartment that clung to the roof of the Dome was there left air to breathe. And, from the void beyond, the silver space ship sped on toward Mercury, sped on to a safe landing that, but for Darl Thomas's sacrifice, would have been her doom....

Guided by Jim and Angus, a party of men from the battle-flier, equipped with oxygen respirators, went to the aid of Darl. They dug him out from under his crumpled plane and the piled splinters of quartz. His metal was dented and twisted, but unpierced. They carried him tenderly to the space ship, and carefully set him down. The ship's physician listened long with his stethoscope, then looked up and smiled.

"He's alive," the doctor said, "just barely alive. The thick padding of bandages must have saved him from the full shock of the crash. They're hard to kill, these ITA men. I'll be able to bring him around, God willing."

_______________

Only two small groups of people— enemies— survive the vast desolation of the Final War.

2: When the Sleepers Woke

Astounding Stories November 1932.

"PREPARE for battle!" The command crackled in Allan Dane's helmet. "Enemy approaching from southeast! Squadron commanders execute plan two!" Allan settled back in the seat of his one-man helicopter, his broad frame rendered even bulkier by the leather suit that incased it. He was tensed, but quiescent. Action would be first joined sixty miles away, and his own squadron was in reserve.

Over New York and its bay the American air fleet was in motion. Suddenly movement ceased, and the formation froze. Ten flying forts were each the apex of a far-spread cone, axis horizontal, whose body was the fanned back-ranging of its squadron of a thousand helicopter planes. The cones bristled oceanward from the sea-margin of New York, their points a fifty-mile arc of defiance, their bases tangent to one another, almost touching the ground at their lower edges, then circling upward for ten thousand feet. From van to rear each formation was five miles in length.

Behind and above, the main body of the fleet sloped in echeloned ranks, hiding the threatened city with an impenetrable terraced wall of buzzing helios and massive forts. Up, back, up, back, the serried masses reached, till the rearmost were twenty-five thousand feet aloft. And farther behind, unmoving on their six-mile level, were the light 'copters of the reserve. Dane gazed down that tremendous vista to the far-off front line, and swore softly. Just his luck to be out of the scrap: the enemy would never penetrate to these northern out-skirts of New York.

"Men of the fleet!" General Huntington's voice sounded from his flagship, the Washington. Somehow its gruffness overrode the mechanical quality of the intra-fleet radio transmission. Almost it seemed he was there in the tiny cabin. "Reports have at this moment been received that our attack fleets have been everywhere successful. Our rocket ships have destroyed Tokyo, Addis Ababa, Odessa, Peiping and Cape Town, and are now ranging inland through enemy territory."

Even through the double leather of his helmet a roar came to Allan. He felt his craft vibrate to the exultant cheers of the fleet. His own mouth was open, and his throat rasping....

"But"— the single syllable choked the surge of sound— "London, Paris, and Berlin have fallen to the enemy." The words thudded in the pilot's ear-phones. "San Francisco is being attacked. Communication with New Orleans has failed. The enemy are in sight of Buenos Aires— " The general broke off, and Allan sensed dully that there was other news, news that he dared not give the fleet.

The gruff voice changed. "Men of the fleet, New York is in our charge. The enemy is upon us, the battle is commencing. The issue is in your hands."

Pat on his last word, a dark cloud spread along the south-eastern horizon. From the spear-heads of the cone formations great green beams shot out across the sea. Orange flame flared in answer, all along the black bank that was the enemy fleet. Where the green beams struck the orange blinked out, and the blue of sky showed through. And the American ships were as yet untouched. A great shout rose to Allan's lips— that they had the range on the enemy, and the attack defeated before it was well begun.

But was it? Swift as the American rays scythed destruction along the enemy line, the gaps filled and lethal orange leaped out again. Now the black cloud was piling up, was rising till it was a towering curtain against the sky. On it came, like some monstrous tidal wave. Great rents were torn through it by the stabbing beams of the flying forts, holes where ships and men had been whiffed into dust by the hundred. But the attack came on.

Now all the great defensive cones burst into an emerald blaze as the smaller ships loosed their bolts. And from the terraced slope of the supporting fleet a hundred steel ovoids lumbered forward to meet the threat. All the vast space between the hosts, mountain-high from the sea's surface, was filled with dazzling light, now green, now orange, as the conflicting beams crossed and mingled. There were gaps in the advancing curtain that did not fill, but the defending cones were melting away, were disappearing, were gone.

"Flight ZLX prepare for action!" Dane's eyes flicked over the gages, checking in routine precaution. He started when he saw the V of the chronometer's hands. Only six minutes had passed since the battle's start— it seemed hours. And already the reserve was being called on! He was suddenly cold. Out there, over the bay, the enemy forces had ceased their advance. The American first line cones were gone— true enough, but the support fleet was still intact. Some new element had entered the battle, visible as yet only in the Washington's powerful television view-screens. The flight adjutant's voice again snapped a command:

"Direction vertical. Thirty thousand feet. Full speed. Go!"

Dane jerked home his throttle. The battle shot down, and his seat thrust up against him. Something hurtled past, blurred by the speed of its descent. The plane rocked to a sudden detonation, and Allan fought to steady it. Then he had reached the commanded height. At sixty thousand feet the helio vanes were useless, only the power of the auxiliary rocket-tubes maintained his altitude.

"Formation B. Engage the enemy!" came the order.

They were just ahead, a dozen giant craft, torpedo-shaped and steel-incased, the scarlet fire of their gas blasts holding them poised steady in their fifty-mile-long line. From curious swellings that broke the clean lines of their under-bodies black spheres were dropping in steady streams. Allan knew then whence came the crash that had rocked his ship as she rose. These were bombs, huge bombs, charged with heaven alone knew what Earth-shaking explosive. They were catapulting down, an iron death hail, on the fleet and the city twelve miles below!

The enemy's strategy was clear. While his main fleet was engaging the American defense in a frontal attack, these huge rocket-bombers had looped unseen through the stratosphere to this point of vantage. The planes that had leaped to this new menace swept toward the bombers in three parallel lines, above, to right and left of them. Allan's plane leaping to position at the very end of one long line. The three leaders reached the first rocket-ship, and their green beams shot out. In that instant the enemy craft seemed to explode in intense blue light. Then the awful dazzle was gone. The rocket ship was there, just as before, but the American helio-planes were gone, were wiped out as though they had never been. The next trio, and the next, rushed up. Again and again came that flash of force, annihilating them. Superbly the tiny gnats that were the American planes plunged headlong at the hovering Leviathan of the air and were whiffed into nothingness. Sixty brave men were dancing motes of cosmic dust before the shocked commander could sound the recall.

The helicopter squadron curved away, still keeping its ordered lines, but orange flame leaped out from all twelve of the enemy vessels, orange flame that caught them, that ran along their ranks and sent them hurtling Earthward— blackened corpses in blazing coffins. "Abandon ships!" The adjutant's last order crisped, coldly metallic, soldierly as ever. In the next breath, as Allan reached for the lever that would open the trapdoor beneath him, he saw the command-ship plunge down, a flaring comet.

Above Allan Dane, the twenty-foot silk of his parachute bellied out in the denser air of the lower heights. His respirator tube was still in his mouth, and the double, vacuum-interlined leather of his safety suit had kept him from freezing in the spatial cold of the stratosphere. He looked south.

All the proud thousands of the defense fleet were gone, blown to fragments by the time bombs from above. The city was hidden in a thick, muddy-yellow fog. "Queer," the thought ran through his brain, "that there should be fog in mid-afternoon, under a blazing sun." Then he saw them, the circling black ships of the enemy, trailing behind them long wakes of the drab yellow vapor that drifted heavily down to shroud New York with— gas!

Allan felt nauseated as he imagined a fleeting picture of the many-leveled city, of its mist-darkened streets with swarming myriads of slumped bodies clogging the conveyor belts that still moved because no hand was left to shut them off; of women and children, and aged or crippled men strewn in tortured, horrible attitudes in all the roof-parks, in their homes, in every nook and cranny of the murdered city. He looked beneath his drifting descent and saw roads that were rivers, alive with every manner of fleeing conveyance, and he groaned, knowing that in moments the pursuing ships would send down their lethal mist to put an end to that futile flight.

Sugar Loaf Mountain rose toward him. At its very summit was a clearing among the trees, and, incongruously motionless in that world where every one was rushing from inescapable death, a man stood calmly there, gazing up at him. Allan screamed down to him! "Run! You fool. Run or the gas will get you!"

Of course the man could not hear that cry, but one tiny arm rose and pointed south. Allan followed the direction of the gesture and saw a black plane veering toward him. Then orange flared from it, though it was distant, and a wave of intolerable heat enveloped him. Something cried within him: "Too far— he's too far off to kill me with his beam!" Then he knew no more.

FROM NEW YORK, from devastated San Francisco, from Rio, from Buenos Aires, from fifty other desolated points along the seaboards of the Americas, the black fleets swept along the coasts and inland, vomiting their yellow death till all the continents were blanketed with life-destroying gas. And in Europe and Australasia the destroying hordes, having smashed the proud defenses of the coastlines, engaged in the same pursuit, till in one short week all the lands of the Western Allies were swept clear of life. Then the Eastern ships turned homeward, to wait until the vapor they had strewn had lost its virulence, and the teeming masses of the East might take possession of the half world the ebony-painted destroyers had conquered. The black fliers turned homeward, but there was no homeland left for them to seek!

For though the defense fleets of the Western Coalition had been everywhere beaten, their attack squadrons had been everywhere successful. All Asia and Africa lay under a pall of milky emerald gas as toxic, as blasting, as the Easterners' yellow.

And the Westerners were returning too!

In their teleview screens the commanders of the black swarms, and of the white thousands, sought their home ports, and saw the world to be a haze-covered sphere where not even a fly could live. Then, as if by common accord, the white ships and the black sped across lifeless hemispheres to meet in mid-air over the long green swells of the Pacific. They met, and on the instant they were at each others' throats like two packs of wild dogs, killing, killing, killing till they themselves were killed. No quarter was asked in that fight, and none given. No hope of victory was there, nor fear of defeat. Better swift death in the high passion of combat, than slow, hopeless drifting over a dead world.

But there was one black ship that slunk out of that mass suicide of man's last remnant. Within its long hulk three motionless forms lay in a welter of blood that smeared their officers' badges, and a dozen gibbering men labored at the controls of their craft. The long black shadows came at last to veil an empty sky, and a sea whereon there was drifting wreckage but not one sign of any life. And as far to the north a shadowed airship sped athwart the moon, searching for one spot, one tiny patch of solid ground, that was free from the dread gas.

CONSCIOUSNESS came slowly back to Allan Dane. At first he was aware, merely, that he was alive. That was astonishing enough. Even if the orange beam had not killed him with its heat, the gas should have struck his leather suit. The Easterners could not be behind his own forces in their development of that terrible weapon.

Allan felt a coolness on his face, his hands, that could mean only that his helmet and gloves had been removed. He heard movement, and opened his eyes.

At first he could see only blueness, pale and lambent. He gazed dully up at a lustrous, glasslike substance that arched above him. The sound of some one moving came again, and Allan turned his head to it. His neck muscles seemed stiff, that simple motion drew tremendously on his strength.

About fifteen yards away, a man bent over a transparent, boxlike contrivance in which something fluttered. From this device a metal tube angled away into the wall. There was other apparatus on the long table at which the man was—

"At last! Clear at last!" a mellow, rounded voice exclaimed jubilantly.

"Clear? Are you sure, Anthony, are you sure?" This other voice, throbbing with vibrant repression as if its owner feared to believe longed-for tidings come at last, was a woman's. As the man half turned, its owner came between him and Allan. All he could see of them was that the one called Anthony was very tall, and thin, and the woman almost as tall, and that both wore hooded white robes, the woman's falling to her heels, the man's to his knees, waist-girdled with black cords.

"Look for yourself, Helen."

She bent over the transparent cage. "Oh Anthony, how wonderful!"

Allan attempted to rise. He was unutterably weak; to move a finger was a gigantic task, to do more impossible. He tried to call out. No sound came from his straining throat.

The couple straightened. The man spoke, too low for Dane to hear. Each took something from the table, something that gleamed metallically. Then they turned— and Allan saw what the white robes clothed!

Skulls leered at him from beneath the hoods— fleshless skulls; tinted a pale green! Jutting jawbones, cavernous cheeks, lipless mouths that grinned mirthlessly— his eyes froze to them and a scream formed within him that he could not utter. Hands appeared from within the flowing sleeves, and they were skeleton hands, each phalanx clearly marked. They moved, that was the worst of it, the hands moved; and deep in the shadowed eye-pits of the skulls blue light glowed in living eyes that peered at something to Allan's right.

His eyes followed the direction of their gaze. Ranged along the wall, and jutting out, he saw four couches. On each was a figure, shrouded and hooded in white. Utterly still they were— and the cadaverous countenances exposed between robe and hood betrayed not the slightest twitch. The arms were crossed on each breast. Allan realized that his own arms were similarly crossed. He looked down at them, saw the white gleam of a robe that fell down his length in smooth, still folds, saw his hands— greenish skin stretched tight over fleshless bones. Suddenly it seemed to him that the air was musty and fetid.

Footsteps slithered across the floor. The woman-form bent over the farthest couch. With one skeleton hand she bared an arm of the corpselike figure; the other hand lifted— metal glinted in it and plunged into the unshrinking limb! A slow movement of the bony fingers and the threadlike, silvery thing was withdrawn. She stared ghoulishly— and the man, too, gazed tensely at her victim. A long quiver ran through the recumbent shape, another. The death's-head on the pallet moved slightly— and merciful blackness welled up in Allan's brain....

A cool liquid was in his mouth. He swallowed instinctively, and warmth ran through his veins. He felt strength flooding back into him— and he remembered horror.

"That's better," a mellow voice said, close above him. "Drink just a little more." The cool liquid came up against Allan's lips again, pungent, and he drank. Once more strength surged warmingly within him. "That's a good fellow. A little more now."

Fingers were on Allan's wrist, life-warm. There was friendliness in the voice that was speaking to him, and solicitude. He dared to look.

A skull-like head was right before him. But seen thus closely, the terror of it was lessened. Fleshless indeed it was. But a parchment skin was tightly drawn over the bones, and Allan could see that its true shade was a sere yellow. It was the bluish light that had given it the green of decay. The deep-sunk eyes were kindly; they gleamed with pleasure as Allan's opened; and the voice asked:

"How do you feel?"

Allan made shift to reply, though a strange lassitude still enervated him, and his mouth was full of tongue. "Much better, thank you. But who— who...?"

With a sudden access of energy Allan sat up on his couch. He looked about him, and his fears were back full flood.

He was in a chamber with neither door nor window— floor, walls, and arched ceiling entirely formed of the palely lustrous, glasslike substance. The room was perhaps twenty by forty feet, its ceiling curving to about five yards from the floor at its highest point, and the spectral blue glow that filled it was apparently sourceless. It lit three vacant couches to his left. To his right were the four he had already seen. The woman was ministering to the occupants of these— living skeletons that lay flaccid, but whose heads were moving, barely moving from side to side. Like nothing else but a sepulcher the place seemed, a tomb in which the dead had come to life!

Allan clutched at Anthony's arm, grasped textured fabric that was cold to his frantic touch, and thin bone beneath. "In Heaven's name," he mouthed, "tell me what sort of place this is before— " He stopped, appalled by a sudden thought. Perhaps he was insane, this seeming tomb really some hospital ward transformed by his crazed brain. A wave of weakness overcame him, and he fell back.

"Careful," the other spoke soothingly, "you must give the plasma time to act or you may harm yourself."

If Allan shut out sight with his eyelids, and listened only to the resonance of Anthony's voice, he could hold his slipping grip on reason. He felt that the cloth of his robe was metal, fine spun and woven. That was strangely reassuring.

"How long do you think you have slept?"

"How long?" Dane murmured. Something told him that he had been unconscious for a long time. "A week?"

Anthony sighed. "No. Longer than that, much longer." There was reluctance in his tone. "You have lain here for twenty years."

Allan's eyes flew open, and he stared up into the speaker's face. Twenty years! Somehow it did not occur to him to disbelieve this astounding statement. He struggled hard to realize its implication. Two decades had passed since last he remembered. He had been a youth then. Now he was forty-four.

Anthony continued. "That may be a shock to you, but this will be a greater. Unless I am greatly mistaken, we seven, we four men and three women, are the only living humans left on Earth."

The words dripped into Allan's consciousness. Beyond them, he could hear movements, exclamations. But they meant nothing to him. Only the one thought tolled, knell-like, within him. "We seven are the only living humans left on Earth."

Dimly he knew that Anthony was talking. "There is a possibility, a bare possibility, that somewhere near here there are two others. That chance is faint indeed. Otherwise humanity is dead, killed by its own hand."

Through a dizzy vertigo that blurred sight and sound Allan heard the rounded voice go on and on, telling the story of the doom that Man's own folly had brought. And intermingled with that tale of a world gone mad there came back to the listener the clear-cut vision of the day of horror that to him seemed but yesterday. He remembered the sudden ultimatum of the Easterner's, the Western Coalition's stanch defiance. Again he saw a supposedly invincible fleet utterly destroyed, saw comrades whiffed out of existence in infinitesimal seconds. Again he watched a city of twenty millions inundated by a muddy yellow gas in which no human being, no animal, might live. He waked once more to find himself helpless with weakness, among living corpses, in a place that seemed a tomb.

"All this we saw in our long-distance televisoscope." Anthony gestured to a blank screen above the apparatus ranged along the opposite wall. "Then, just as that last weird battle ended, something happened to the eye-mast outside, and we were isolated." He fell silent, in a brooding reverie, and Allan, recovered somewhat, saw that the other strange occupants of the place had risen and were clustered about that cage where something fluttered.

He turned to his mentor. "But I still don't understand. How is it that we escaped the holocaust?"

"Four of us, members of the scientific faculty of the National University, having foreseen the inevitable result of the course of world events, had joined forces and developed a substance— we called it nullite— so dense and so inert that no gas could penetrate it or chemical break it down. We offered it to the Western General Staff, and were laughed at for our pains. Then we decided to use it to preserve our families from the danger we foresaw.

"At first we sheathed one room in each of our own dwellings with the nullite. Later we decided that the deposited gas might last for many years, and blasted out this cave, a hundred feet below the summit of Sugar Loaf Mountain, for a common refuge.

"When the red word flared from the newscast machines, 'War!', we fled here with our wives, as we had planned. All, that is, save one couple, the youngest of us. They never arrived— I waited for them in the clearing at the entrance to the shaft. At the last moment I saw you dropping in your parachute, saw the death beam just miss you, saw you land at my feet, unconscious, but still breathing. I carried you in with me. There were two vacant spaces: you could occupy one of them. Then we sealed the last aperture with nullite, and settled to our vigil. We did not know how long the gas would last, but we had sufficient concentrated food, and enough air-making chemicals, to last two persons for a century."

"Two people," Allan interjected. "But there were seven here."

Anthony nodded. "We had worked out every detail of our plan. When release came we needs must be in the full vigor of our prime. From our loins must spring the new race that will repopulate the Earth; that will found a new civilization, better, we hope, and wiser than the one that had died. By injecting a certain compound we suspended animation in all but a single couple. Those so treated were to all intents dead, though their bodies did not decay. The two who remained awake kept watch, making daily tests of the outside atmosphere, drawn through tubes of nullite that pierced the seal. At the end of six months they revived another couple by the use of a second injection, and were themselves put to sleep. We exempted you from the watch, since you could have no companion, so that while we have lived about seven years in the twenty, you have not aged at all."

"Not aged at all!" Dane exclaimed. "Why, I have wasted away to a mere bagful of bones, and you others also."

The other smiled wistfully. "Even though life was the merest thread there was still an infinitely slow using of bodily tissue. But the drink we partook of as we awoke is a plasma that will very quickly restore the lost body elements. In an hour we shall all have been rejuvenated. You will be again the age you were on that fateful day in 2163, and the rest of us but seven years older. Look!" He moved aside, so that Allen could see the others, who had gathered around his couch. They were a curious semicircle of gaunt figures, but he could see that they had subtly changed. Still emaciated beyond description, they were no longer simulacra of death. The contours of their faces were rounding, were filling out, and the faintest tinge of pink was creeping into the yellow of their skins.

"Anthony, isn't it time that we opened the seals and went outside? Haven't we been long enough in this prison?" It was a short man who spoke, his voice impatient, and there was an eager murmur from the others.

"I am as anxious as you." Anthony's slow words were dubious. "But it may still be dangerous. The gas may have cleared away only from our immediate vicinity. In hollows, or places where the air is stagnant, it may still be toxic. It is my opinion that only one should go at first, to investigate."

A babble of volunteering cries burst out, but Dane's voice cut through the others. "Look here," the sentence tumbled from his lips. "I'm an extra here. It doesn't matter whether I live or die— I have no special knowledge. I cannot even father a family, since I have no wife. I am the only one to go out as long as there is danger."

"The young man is right," some one said. "He is the logical choice."

"Very well," agreed Anthony, who appeared the leader. "He shall be the first."

His instructions were few. One plane had been preserved, and was in the shaft. Allan was to make a circuit of the neighborhood. If he deemed it safe he was to visit the building, described to him, where the fourth couple had lived, and see if he could find trace of them. Then he was to return and report his findings.

All stuffed their ears with cotton wool, and crowded against one end of the chamber. Anthony had the end of a long double wire in his hand, and it curled across the floor to the farther wall. He pressed the button of a pear-switch— and there was a concussion that hurled the watchers against the wall behind them. A great gap appeared in the farther wall, beyond it a black chasm, and a helicopter that was dimly illumined by the light from within the room. A quick inspection of the flier revealed that its alumino-steeloid had been unaffected by the passage of time, and Allan climbed into it. A wave of his hand simulated an insouciance he did not feel. Then he was rising through darkness. The sun's light struck down and enveloped him, and he was in the open air. He rose above the trees.

Desolation spread out beneath him. In all the vastness that unfolded as the lone 'copter climbed into a clear sky, nothing moved. The air, that from babyhood Allan had seen crowded with bustling traffic, was a ghastly emptiness. Not even a tiny, wheeling speck betrayed the presence of a bird. And below— the gas that was fatal to animal life seemed to have stimulated vegetable growth— an illimitable sea of green rolled untenanted to where the first ramparts of New York rose against the sky. Roads, monorail lines, all the countless tracks of civilization had disappeared beneath the green tide. Nature had taken back its own.

Heartsick, he turned south, and followed the silver stream of the Hudson. The river, lonely as the sky, seemed to drift oily and sluggish down to plunge beneath the city at the lower end of the Tappan Zee. Allan Dane came over New York, gazed down at the ruin of its soaring towers, at the leaping arabesque of its street bridges. He peered into vast rifts of tumbled, chaotic concrete and steel. Nothing moved in all that spreading wonder that had housed twenty millions of people.

Allan drifted lower, and saw that from what had been gardened roof-parks, now a welter of strewn earth, the green things had spread till they covered the heaped jetsam with a healing blanket of foliage. Not all the city had been laid waste, however. Here and there, great expanses of the cliff-like structures still stood, undamaged, and in the midst of one of these areas he saw the high-piled edifice to which he had been directed. Its roof was lush with vegetation but by dextrous handling he set his helicopter down upon it.

The engine roar diminished and died. Silence folded around him, a black, thick blanket.

Dane got heavily from his seat, oppressed by the vast soundlessness, and pushed through curling plants that caught at his heels. The sound of his passage was like crackling thunder. A decaying door was marked, in faded, almost undecipherable letters, "Emergency Stairs." It was half open, and Allan squeezed around its edge. Spiral steps curved down into blackness. He hesitated a moment. He could feel the awful silence, the emptiness below was a pit of death. Anthony's words came back to him, echoed in his ears: "We seven are the only living humans left on Earth."

In that moment, out of the pitch-black well of soundlessness, a scream shrilled! No words, only a red, thin thread of sound, rising, and falling, and rising again out of depths where not even a living mouse should be! It came again, ripping the silence— a woman's scream, high-pitched, quivering with fear!

Allan plunged down into the darkness, caroming from wall to wall as he half ran, half fell, down the twisting stairs. Another sound reverberated from unseen walls, and Dane realized that it was his own voice, shouting.

His feet struck level floor. A pale rectangle of light showed before him, and he dived through it. He was in a corridor, dim-lit by phosphorescent fungi that cloaked the damp walls. He halted, at fault. The long hall stretched away to either side, cluttered with grimed bones, slimy with mold. By the age-blistered name cards on closed doors he knew himself to be on a residential level. But which way should he turn? Whence had come that scream? He crouched against the wall, his heartbeats thudding loud in his ears, and listened for a clue.

A muffled sound of scuffling came from his left. Allan whirled toward it and sped down the corridor. He was breathing in great gasps, and the air he breathed was thick and musty. Too late to stop, he saw a slick of green slime on the floor. His foot struck it, flew out from under him, he fell and slid headlong.

Something stopped him, something that crunched sickeningly as his sliding body crashed into it: two skeleton forms, clasped in each others' arms, moldering fabric hanging in rags from them. They lay across the threshold of a door, and just within Dane heard snarls, snufflings, bestial growls, the sounds of a struggle. Something thumped against the door and fell away. He heaved to his feet and his hand found the doorknob. But suddenly he was powerless to turn it. Panic tugged at him with almost palpable fingers, drove him to go back to his plane and safety. Almost he fled— but he remembered in time that it was ahuman scream he had heard.

The portal gave easily to his lunge. Bluish light flooded the chamber, dazzling after the fungous dimness. A bulking form, whether ape or man he could not make out, so brutish the face, so hairy the dark body revealed by its tattered rags bent over the sprawled shape of a girl. Dane saw her in a fleeting glimpse— the slim length of her, the tumbled, golden hair half hiding, half revealing white curves of beauty, a shoulder from which the tunic had been torn away. Then her attacker whirled toward the intruder. Allan leaped from the threshold, his fist arcing before him. The blow landed flush on the other's jaw.

Yellow, rotted fangs showed in a jet-black face, and the huge Negro lunged for Dane, roaring his rage. Before the American could dodge or strike again the other's long arms were around him. Allan was jerked against a barrel chest, felt his bones cracking in a terrific hug. Eyes, tiny and red, stared into his. Dane drove knees and fists into the Negro, but the awful pressure of those simian arms across his back increased till he could no longer breathe. The American was almost gone, the black face blurred, and the continuous snarling of the brute was dull in his ears.

Suddenly Dane went limp. Victory flashed into the red eyes. The squeezing arms relaxed, and in that moment Allan's legs curled around the black's, heels jerking into the hollows behind his captor's knees. At the same instant, levering from that heel hold, Dane butted sharply up against the rocky jaw. All the strength that was left in him went into that trick, and it worked! The Negro crashed backward to the floor. Allan twisted, and rolled free. He was up, looking desperately around for some weapon. But it was not needed; the hulk on the floor never moved. The back of the Negro's head had smashed against the floor, and he was out.

Dane turned and bent to the girl. She, too, was motionless, but to his relief her breast rose and fell steadily. He glanced about looking for water to revive her. Then he saw that this room was sheathed with nullite. Then this was one of the chambers prepared before the plans were changed. But the girl could not be of the fourth couple— the missing two that had never appeared. She was no more than eighteen. And whence had come the giant black who had attacked her?

"Stick up your hands. Quick!"

Allan whirled to the sudden challenge. The man in the doorway was pointing a ray-gun steadily at him! Dane's hands went up, and he gasped inanely: "Who are you?"

"What is going on here? Where did you come from?" The newcomer's English was precise, too precise. No hulking brute, this. A yellow man, slitted eyes slanted and malevolent; broad, flat nose above thin lips that were purple against the saffron skin. The uniform he wore showed signs of some attempt to keep it in repair, and to its threadbare collar still clung a tarnished insignia: the seven-pointed star, emblem of the enemy Allan had fought on a yesterday that was two decades gone.

"Well? Have you lost the power of speech?" The ray-gun jerked forward impatiently.

An obscure impulse prompted Allan's reply. "Almost. I've spoken to no one for twenty years."

"So-o,"— softly. The Oriental's eyes flicked past Dane, and a sudden light glowed in them. "You have been alone for twenty years in this city we thought was empty, but you were on hand to fight with Ra-Jamba for this delightful creature." Something leered from his face that sent the hot blood surging to Allan's temples. The Easterner stepped catlike into the room, shutting the door behind him with his free hand.

"That is true," the American said, with what calmness he could muster. Through the dizzy whirl of his mind he clung to one thought: he must conceal the existence of the little group on Sugar Loaf Mountain at all costs. "I had just discovered that it was safe to leave the room, similar to this, in which I had hidden from the gas, when I heard a scream. I reached here just in time to— "

"To interfere with Ra-Jamba's pleasure, and save the little white dove— for me. My thanks." The yellow man bowed mockingly. "Too bad," he purred, "that you should be robbed of the spoils of your fight." Then he asked irrelevantly. "So some of you Americans found a way to cheat our gas. How many?"

Allan temporized. There had been several similar refuges prepared, he said, but he did not know whether they had been used. This was the first he had visited beside his own. But how was it that the questioner knew so little about what had happened here? Had his people simply laid this country waste and never revisited it?

The Oriental shrugged. "My people are gone, wiped out by your gas as yours were wiped out by ours." He retold Anthony's story. "The crew of my own ship mutinied," he concluded. "We fled north, from that last terrible fight, north, ever north, till at the top of the world we found a little space that was not gas-covered. There was nothing there, just the ice, and the snow, and the cold. We lived there, twelve of us, all men. There were a few bears and seals. We slew them for food— and we grew a little mad. We were men— all men— do you understand?"

As he said this last, his thin voice rose to a shriek, and his eyes darted to the girl's recumbent form. At length, he went on, the gas began to retreat, and they followed it down. They had searched town after town, city after city, had found food in plenty, and all the trappings of civilization. But there was never a living being. And the fever in their blood drove them on.

That very morning the insane search had reached New York. They had landed on the roof of this very building. "We separated to hunt— and Ra-Jamba was the lucky one. But I— Jung Sin— am still luckier." He crept nearer to Allan, and tapped him on the chest with his weapon. "For look you— while those fools used all their ray-gun charges, even the charge of the big tube on our ship, to kill food, I husbanded mine." He laughed shrilly. "So you see, I have the only ray-gun in the world. It shall make me master of the Earth." Again he laughed wildly.

"Now I'm going to kill you." The black cylinder leveled, and Dane stared at death. Alone, he would almost have welcomed it, but the thought of the girl in the filthy power of this beast seared through him. Jung Sin, the little red worms of madness crawling in his brain, paused for a final taunt.

"Let the thought of the white dove in my arms cons— " Allan's sandaled foot shot out into the man's stomach. In the same movement his hands came down, one snatched at and caught the ray-gun, the other smashed into the yellow face. Jung Sin lifted to the drive of fist and foot, crashed into the wall, fell to its foot. From the crumpled heap rose a shriek, a long piercing wail that ended in a gurgle.

Dane froze, the captured cylinder in his hand, and listened. There were others of the unholy band about. Had they heard? Dim sounds came to him. He leaped to the door, flung it open. Faint footfalls, a distant shout, came from far down the corridor, away from the direction of the stairs. Allan glimpsed dark forms, rushing toward him. He darted back to the girl, swung her, still unconscious, to his shoulder, and was out. The floor was slippery beneath his feet. He reeled as he ran, and the sounds of pursuit gained on him. The heavy burden weighed him down, the dim hallway stretched endlessly before him. From close behind came hoarse, guttural shouts that chilled him.

The pack was not twenty feet away when Allan reached the stair door. He slammed it behind him, heard the latch click. He mounted the narrow, winding steps with the last dregs of energy draining from him, and heard a crash below that told of the collapse of the barrier. But he had reached his plane, had flung the girl into it, and was pulling himself in when the first of the pursuers burst out on the roof.

Allan thrust home the throttle, the helio-vanes whined, and his 'copter leaped skyward. He glimpsed men running across the roof; they vanished behind a leafy arbor. Dane turned the nose of his craft toward Sugar Loaf, amethyst in the haze of distance, but from that green arch a black aircraft zoomed up and shot after him. The American shook his head free of the cobwebs of fatigue, and veered westward. He must not lead the Easterners to Anthony's refuge.

Through the dead air, over a dead world they shot— Allan's white flier and the ebony plane with the bloody emblem of the seven-pointed star emblazoned on its nose. Allan wheeled again as the pursuers reached his level on a long, climbing slant.

But they continued rising! They, were five hundred, a thousand feet above him. Then they leveled out, and dived down. Their strategy flashed on him— they were planning to shepherd Dane down, to force him to land where they would have him at their mercy. And their craft was the faster!

The black ship was right on his tail; Allan flicked his controls and his 'copter slid sidewise on one wing. The other plane banked in a tight arc and sped for him; Dane countered with a lightning loop that brought him behind his enemy. His gray eyes were steel-hard, his lips were a straight, thin gash. The other ship was faster, but his, lighter and smaller, was more flexible. He could not get away, but— They flipped up and back in an inside loop; Allan's little craft barrel-rolled from under.

This sort of thing could not last forever. With each maneuver he was losing altitude. Serrated roof-tops were already a scant fifteen hundred feet beneath him, gaunt gray fingers that reached up to pluck him from the sky.

Only half Allan's mind was concentrated on the aerial acrobatics. The other half plodded a weary treadmill. In the nullite chamber beneath Sugar Loaf's summit, he thought, were three couples whose knowledge and wisdom had preserved them for the repeopling of the Earth. Their children, and their children's children— starting from such a source what heights might not the new race attain?

On the other hand, the ship that pursued him carried cowards who had failed in mankind's supreme test; men who had lost their manhood, ravening demi-beasts, half mad with loneliness and desire. As long as they remained alive they would be a menace to those others, an unclean band that would forever sully the new world with the old world's evils. Even should Allan himself escape them by some trick of fortune, they must inevitably find the little band of men— and women. A cold chill ran through Dane as he visioned the result.

He was not afraid to die. And the girl in the cabin behind him— better that she never awake than that she be the sport of Ra-Jamba's kind. A grim resolve formed itself, and he watched for a chance to put it into execution.

It came. At the end of a shifting maneuver the black 'copter was above and behind the white. Dane's fingers played swiftly over the control board. His ship flipped over backward, rolling on its long axis as it somersaulted. It was directly beneath the other. Then the helio-vanes screamed, and the American plane surged straight up!

A resounding crash split the air. Metal ripped, a fuel tank exploded. A black wing scaled earthward, zigzagging oddly. Dane's craft and the Eastern ship clung in an embrace of death. They started to drop. But, queerly, the black plane fell faster, left the white one behind as its descent gained speed till it splashed against concrete below. The American helicopter was dropping, too, but sluggishly. Something was buoying it up. Allan, momentarily struggling out of the welter of blackness and pain into which the concussion had thrown him, heard a familiar whine. His helio-vanes were still twirling, limply, stutteringly, bent and twisted, but gripping the air sufficiently to brake his crushed plane's fall.

Afterwards, Allan figured it out. The black pilot had slipped sidewise in that last frantic moment. His effort to escape had been futile, but instead of his ship's body, Dane's plane had struck the wing and torn it off. The impact had irreparably damaged the American craft, but the helicopter motor and vanes had somehow continued to function— just enough. The stanch alumino-steeloid fuselage, though bent and disfigured, had fended the full force of the crash from Allan and his passenger.

Just now, however, Allan Dane was doing no figuring. Pain welled behind his eyes, his left arm was limp, and a broken stanchion jammed his feet so they couldn't move. The vane motor stuttered and stopped, the plane floor dropped away from beneath him, then thudded against something. The jar jolted Allan into a gray land where there was nothing....

Someone was talking. He couldn't make out the words, but the sound was pleasant. It soothed the throb, throb in his head. Gosh, that had been some party last night, celebrating Flight ZLX's first prize in maneuvers! Great bunch, but would they be as good in real war— sure to come soon? Dane's stuff had too much kick; he must have passed out early.

Somebody shaking him.

"Lea' me 'lone; wanna sleep."

"Oh, wake up, please wake up."

Girl's voice. Nice voice. Voice like that should have pretty face. Better not look, though; too bad if she had buck teeth or squint eyes.

"Oh, what will I do? You're not dead? Please, you're not dead?"

"Don't think so. Head hurts too much." Allan opened his eyes. "Wrong again. Mus' be dead. Only angel could look like that. Not in right place, though. Mistake in shipping directions— tags switched or something."

A cold hand lay across his brow, and he felt it quiver. "Don't talk like that. Wake up." There was hysteria in the limpid tones.

Allan's brain mists cleared, and he grinned wryly. "I remember now. You all right?"

"Yes. But who are you? Are you Anthony Starr?"

"No. But Anthony sent me." Allan struggled to rise. He saw twisted wreckage beside him. He gasped. "I seem to be a bit conked. But what— what do you know about Anthony?"

The girl fumbled in her garments, brought out a paper. Allan found that he could move his right arm without much pain. He took the yellowed sheet, and read the faded writing.

Dear Naomi:

You are asleep, and we have been standing by your couch, drinking in the dear sight of you. You sleep soundly, tired as you are by the long-promised story we told you on this, your sixteenth birthday, the tale of how the world you know only from our teachings was destroyed, of how we planned with our friends to escape the general fate, of how an accident separated us from them and immured us here alone, of how you were born in this room and why you have lived here all your short life. We told you all that, but there is one thing we did not tell you.

Our food supply has run low, and the gas outside shows no signs of abatement. With careful husbanding we could all three live for another four months, but there is no prospect that we shall be released in so short a time. Alone, you will have sufficient for a year. If we had had some of Carl Thorman's life-suspension serum— but it was his perfection of that which caused the change of plan to a common refuge, and we never thought to stock with it the discarded rooms in our own apartments.

We have talked it over, and have decided that you must have that eight months' extra chance. And so, dear daughter, this must be farewell.

When the gas is gone Anthony will come to seek us, if he still lives. You will know him by the white robe of metal fabric he will wear, with its black girdle. Trust yourself to him; he was our friend. If all the food has been consumed, and he still has not come, open the door. But fate will not be so cruel to you.

We are weary of the long waiting, Naomi. Do not grieve for us. We shall go out into the gas hand in hand, and release will be welcome.

God guard you.

Allan was deeply moved by the love and sacrifice so simply worded. He looked at the girl, and had to blink away a mist that hazed his sight before he could see her. "I see," he said. "When the year ended and Anthony had not come, you opened the door— "

"And the gas was gone. Then I heard someone moving far down the corridor. I was so happy. Who could it be but Anthony? I called. A hairy, black giant came running, bellowing in some strange language. I was terribly frightened: I think I screamed, and tried to shut the door. But he was too quick for me: he was in the room, and his filthy paws reached out for me. I screamed again, dodged away from him. He pursued me. I threw myself backward, tripped, and fell. My head crashed against the floor.

"The next thing I knew I was here, and you were twisted and jammed there in front of me. At first I wanted to run, then I saw your robe. I dragged you out. Then I spied that other pile of wreckage, and I thought you too were dead...." She covered her face with her hands.

Allan turned his head, saw for the first time the crumpled debris of the black ship, a hundred feet away, saw stark forms. "There's nothing to be afraid of now," he said. "It's all over. We'll soon be with your father's friend, with Anthony."

A little smile of reassurance trembled on the girls lips. "Oh, do you think so?"

Allan nodded.

"Sure thing! Just trust to me, Miss ...?"

"Call me Naomi."

"I'm Allan." The pilot thrust out his big hand, full fleshed now, and a little white one fluttered into it. An electric thrill rippled at the contact, and the two hands clung. The girl gave a little gasp, and pink flushed her cheeks.

Naomi shivered a little, and Allan realized that a chill breeze was sweeping across the roof-tops and that daylight was almost gone. "Look here, partner, we'd better get started, somewhere." He pulled himself to his feet. Pain shot through him and his head still throbbed. "I'd better take a look at that." He gestured to the wreck of the Eastern ship. "You wait here."

When he returned his face was pallid, and there was a sick look in his eyes. The girl asked sharply: "What is it? What's wrong? Tell me, Allan!"

He looked at her grimly, started to say something, thought better of it. Then: "It wasn't a pleasant sight." He shrugged. "Come on, let's see what we can find. We'll have to spend the night here, and start for Sugar Loaf Mountain in the morning."

Once more Allan descended a narrow, spiral staircase into darkness and silence. But this time someone was at his side, and a warmness ran through him at the thought.

The topmost floor of this building was a residential level. Like the one where he had found Naomi, a green mold covered everything, and pallid fungi, emitting a pale-green phosphorescence, clung to the walls and ceiling of the long corridor. Apparently the dwellers here had rushed out at the first alarm, had died elsewhere. "This is luck," Allan said. "We shall have a comfortable place to sleep, and food is not far away."

"How is that?"

"Why, the stores level is not far below. Most of New York's structures have a number of residential levels at the top, then a floor of retail stores, and below that amusement places, offices, and factories."

"But whatever food there was must be decayed by this time."

"The fresh food, yes. But there was a lot of canned stuff, and that is probably all right." He pushed open a door. In the eery light a well-furnished living room was revealed. "You wait here, and I'll see what I can rustle up."

"But I want to go with you."

Allan was inflexible. "Please do as I say. I have my reasons."

The girl turned away. "Oh, very well," she said flatly, "if you don't want me with you."

"That's a good scout. I'll be back just as quickly as I can. And, by the way, lock the door from the inside, and don't open it till you hear my voice."

The girl looked at him wonderingly. "But— " she began.

"Don't ask me why. Do it." There was a curious note in Allan's voice, one that cut off Naomi's question. The door shut, and Dane heard the bolt shoot home.

He stood in the corridor, listening intently, his face strained. There was no sound save that of Naomi's movements behind the locked door. Allan turned to search for the auxiliary staircase that must be somewhere near the bank of ascendor doors.

Silence was again around him, almost tangible in its heaviness. His footsteps reverberated through dead halls, the echo curiously muffled by the coating of slime that spread dankly green. Allan found the staircase well, descended cautiously, pausing often to listen. Not even the faint scuttering of vermin rewarded him.

At last, three stories down, he reached the stores level. Here, in a great open hall, were the numerous alcoved recesses of the shops. Once thronged, and gaudy with the varicolored goods brought by plane and heavy-bellied rocket-freighter from both hemispheres, the vast space was a desert of moldering dust heaps, brooding. There was a faint odor in the stagnant air— of spices, and rustling silks, of rare perfumes, of all the luxury of the Golden Age that Man's folly had ended.

Allan searched the long shelves feverishly, a nervous urge to complete his task and get back to Naomi tingling in his veins. Once he stopped suddenly, his body twisting to the stair landing. He seemed to have heard something, an indefinable thudding, the shadow of a sound. But it did not come again, and he dismissed it as the thumping of his own blood in his ears, audible in that stillness.

At the end of a long aisle, neat rows of cans greeted him, the labels rotted off, the metal rust-streaked, but apparently tight and whole. He found a metal basket, a roll of wire, twisted a handle for the basket and filled it, choosing the cans by their shape. He should have liked to explore further, but the urge to return tugged at him. He went up the stairs three at a time.

There was a dark, oblong break in the long glowing wall of the upper corridor! The door— it was the door of the apartment where he had left Naomi! He leaped down the hall, shouting. The portal hung open, shattered: the rooms were stark, staring empty. Allan reeled out again. There were the marks of footprints, of many footprints, in the green scum of the hall floor, their own among them, that had led the marauders straight to the girl!

Fool that he had been! He had thought she would be safer behind a bolted door! Allan berated himself. He had thought not to worry her. There had been only four bodies in the wreckage of the black plane— but how had the rest gotten here so soon?

There was a humming whine from above. Dane hurtled toward the roof stairs. He burst from the upper landing, fists clenched, face a furious mask. A helicopter was just rising. Allan jumped for it, his fingers caught and clung to the undercarriage. But the down-swing of his body broke his hold, and Dane crashed to the roof.

He watched the plane, saw it zoom up, turn east, saw it sink and land a half mile away, atop the building where he had found her. In the moonlight he marked the direction of the place, its distance. Then he was descending stairs, innumerable stairs. He could not hope to reach it in time to save Naomi. But— his eyes grew stony— he could avenge her.

Afterwards that nightmare journey through the murdered city was a detailless blur to Allan. He clambered over heaped rubble, forced himself through windrows of piled bones that crumbled to dust at his touch. Vines, and whipping creepers of triumphant vegetation everywhere halted him; he tore them away with bleeding hands and stumbled on. He fell, and scrambled up again, and plodded on the interminable path till he had reached his goal.

Here, at last, some modicum of reason penetrated into the numbed blankness of his brain. The dark arch of the entrance-way was somehow familiar. Still legible under the verdigris of the bronze plate on the lintel he read, "Transportation Substation— District L2ZX." Now he understood why he had not seen the black flier till it had leaped in pursuit: how it was that Naomi's captors had so quickly found another 'copter. A broad well penetrated the center of this building— its opening must be covered by the luxuriant vines so that he had not noted it— and dropped down to the midsection that was a hangar for local and private planes. His own little Zenith had been stored here on occasion. There must be other helicopters there, and a stock of fuel. A dim plan began to form at the back of his head.

But first he must find where they were, and what had happened to Naomi.

Allan removed his sandals, and began the endless climb. He made no sound on the steps, cushioned as they were with mold, but at each landing he paused for a moment, listening. The cold fire that burned within him left no room for fatigue, for pain.

A murmuring, then a laugh, cut through the deathlike stillness. Allan was nearly to the top. Down the corridor into which he crept, snakelike on his belly, red light flickered from an open door.

Dane moved soundlessly to that door, and, lying flat, pushed his head slowly past the sash till he could see within. By the light of a fire that danced in the center of the unburnable mallite floor, its illumination half revealing their sodden, brutish faces, he saw an unspeakably strange group. A scene from out of the dawn of history it was, the haunch-squatted circle, their yellow skins and black glistening in the crimson, shifting glow. He recognized the giant Negro, Ra-Jamba, his head bound with a rag, and Jung Sin. There were five others clustered about those two, and a third, a skew-eyed Oriental, intent on some game they were playing with little sticks that passed from hand to hand.

Before each of the players there was a little pile of fish bones, black with much handling. The Negro's pile, and that of Jung Sin, were about equal, but there were only two or three in front of the third player. And just as Allan caught sight of them, the sticks clicked, and a shrill objurgation burst from that third as the last of his markers were raked in by Jung Sin's taloned hand. The circle hunched closer, there was a ribald, taunting laugh from Ra-Jamba and Jung Sin glanced over his shoulder into a shadowed corner.

"Have patience, my lotus flower," he purred. "Only one is left. Soon the goddess of fortune and love will clear him from my path. By the nine-headed Dragon, I have never seen a game of Li-Fan last so long. But it draws to an end. Then we shall have our joy together, you and I."

In that instant the fire flared. Allan saw an open window in the background, and beneath it a slim white form lying, bound and helpless. Fierce joy leaped in him, and fiercer hate, Naomi was as yet untouched, the game was being played for her as stake. He had come in time to save her!

But how? There were eight of the Easterners in the room. He had his ray-gun, and might cow them with it and free the girl. But as soon as he had gotten her out of the room, they would surge out after the whites. He could fight for a while, but the end was inevitable. And even if by some miracle he and Naomi escaped, they would be tracked to Sugar Loaf.

The sticks were clicking in a continuous rattle as the final bout of the game waxed fast and furious. And as fast and furious was the whirl of Allan's thoughts. He strove to remember the layout of this building. The helicopter hangar was next above this level. Outside the windows of this floor a narrow ledge ran. The nebulous scheme that had entered his dazed brain as he read the bronze plate below took clearer form, shaped itself to meet this new need.

Allan crept away to safe distance, leaped to his feet and flitted upward. He was in the empty, echoing space of the hangar level. The fuel tanks bulged huge in the dimness. Here were reels of the feed hose he needed— flexible metal that had withstood the years; here a faucet nozzle, and a long coil of fine wire. Haste driving him, he made the connections. Then he was descending again, dragging behind him a long black snake of hose whose other end was clamped to a vat of oxygen impregnated gasoline.

The rustle of the hose along the hall floor was muffled by the greasy slime. Dane got the nozzle to just outside the door of the room where Naomi lay captive. The rattle of the playing sticks still continued. Jung Sin's voice sounded, in a language that Allan did not understand. But there was no mistaking the triumphant note in the silky, jeering tones. The yellow man was winning, and winning fast.

Dane twisted one end of the wire around the faucet handle. Then he was unwinding the coil as he tried the door of the chamber next to the one where the fire burned, found it open, darted across the room and softly raised the sash. The sill here, like the one beneath which Naomi lay, was a bare two feet above the ground.

He was out on the ledge, sliding along it toward the fire-reddened oblong five feet away. He crammed his body close against the wall, kept his eyes away from the unfenced edge of that eighteen-inch shelf. Beyond, an abyss waited, twelve thousand feet of nothingness down which a single misstep, an instant's vertigo, would send him hurtling. Suddenly the rattle of sticks stopped, and he heard the black's long howl of disappointed rage. The game was over!

Allan reached the window, glimpsed a leering semicircle of animal faces, saw Jung Sin coming toward him. Then he had swung in.

"Back, Jung Sin! Back!" Allan was straddled over Naomi's form, the ray-gun thrust out before his tense threat, his face livid, his eyes blazing. "Get back, or I ray you!"

Consternation, awe, flashed into the brutal faces of the Easterners. Jung Sin reeled back, his saffron hands rising. Allan's weapon swept slowly along the line of staring men. "If one of you moves I flash."

He bent to the girl, keeping his eyes on the Easterners, and his weapon steady. He had hung the wire coil over his shoulder, leaving his left hand free to fumble for and untie the cords around Naomi's wrists. He got them loose.

"Can you get your feet free, Naomi?"

"Yes, I can manage it." Her voice was steady, but there was a great thankfulness vibrant in it.

"Then do it and get out on the ledge. Quick." He straightened, and the blaze of his eyes held the yellow men, and the black, motionless.

Naomi, at the window behind him, gasped. "I know it looks tough," he encouraged her, "but you can make it. Don't look down. Go to the left. And keep clear of that wire."

"I'm all right, Allan. But you— "

"Never mind about me. Go ahead."

Jung Sin jerked forward, driven by the madness that twisted his face into gargoyle hideousness. But Allan's ray-gun stabbed at him, and he halted.

"I'm out, Allan."

Dane's foot felt back of him for the sill, found it. He lifted, facing his enemies inexorably, caught the lintel with his left hand, and was crouching outside. A sidewise flick of his eyes showed Naomi just reaching the other window.

He pulled at the wire till it was gently taut. A moment's compunction rose in him at what he was about to do. Then the black roll of the Easterners' crimes rushed into his mind. Naomi's safety, his own, and that of the little colony that had endured so much to preserve humanity, cried out for their extinction. Allan jerked the metal thread, and the faucet nozzle in the corridor opened.

A black stream gushed forward, reached the fire, and the room was a roaring furnace. Allan saw the forms of his enemies silhouetted against the blaze for a fleeting instant, then they were flaming statues. One only, Jung Sin, nearer than the rest, leaped for the window and escaped the first gush of flame. Allan pressed the trigger of his ray-gun. But no blue flash answered that pressure. The weapon's charge had leaked out, was gone!

Allan tore himself loose from yellow hands that clutched at him, his fist crashed into Jung Sin's fear twisted visage, and the crazed Oriental fell back into the roaring blaze.

But Allan himself was thrust backward by that blow, was swaying on the very edge of the chasm. His hand went out for a saving hold on the window sash; flame licked at it. He was toppling, against the strain of his body muscles to resist the inevitable fall, and death reached up from depths for him. Then an arm was around him, was drawing him back to life. Naomi had darted back, defying the terror of that height, the surge of heat. She had reached him just in time— a split-second later and his weight would have been too much for her puny strength. But in this instant, the merest touch was enough to save him. They crept along the ledge and climbed wearily in.

There was another plane in the hangar, and presently Allan had it rising through the well into clean, free air. He turned to the girl in the seat beside him and pointed at the scene they were leaving.

"Look," he said.

The city was in darkness beneath them, save for the one staring rectangle that marked a pyre. But dawn shimmered opalescent in the east.

A soft white hand crept into Allan's. There was a long moment of silence. Then Allan said, softly: "A new day, and a new world for their children."

A sleepy, tired voice sighed: "For their children and ours, Allan."

__________________________

3: The Land Where Time Stood Still

Thrilling Wonder Stories, Aug 1936

1: Into Nothingness

IT was, perhaps, the almost unbelievable antiquity of Silbury Hill that oppressed Ronald Stratton with a queasy premonition of disaster. He thought again of the old legend: that anyone entering the stone rings on top of Silbury Hill between dusk and dawn vanished, leaving no trace. The thought lingered.

The twilight silence, the low-lying layer of ground mist veiling his footing, the chill of evening damp striking into his very bones, combined to trouble the young American with sinister unreality. Something of that feeling had been with him all during the journey through England's South Country; had troubled him as he stood on Salisbury Plain where, twenty years before, had drilled the father he had never known, proud in the uniform of his ancestral land.

Tall and clean-limbed and lithe the American volunteer must have been then, bronze-skinned and frank-eyed as his son now was who retraced in a nostalgic memorial tour the route of his hero father's last voyage. Silbury was part of that sentimental pilgrimage—

Ron Stratton suddenly stumbled, sprawling into a grass-hidden ditch. He rolled, caught at whipping tendrils of a bush, pulled himself to his feet. He took a step forward—into the wrenching, frantic instant of sheer nothingness!

It was as if he had walked over the brink of a sheer precipice, save that, though a bottomless abyss yawned fearfully beneath him, he oddly knew no sensation of falling. The world, the universe had simply vanished from beneath him.

His foot came down on solid ground. Stratton pulled in a gasping, choked breath between his teeth. He'd never before experienced anything like that moment of terrific giddiness, of deathlike vertigo. Queer. The light seemed to have grown stronger. It filtered through the trees with a reddish grow somehow eerie?

The trees! How had he come into this forest? There hadn't been any trees at all, a moment ago! Was he dreaming?

Something scampered through the brush behind Stratton, and he whirled to the sound. A brown beastlet popped into sight between two rugged boles, a perfectly formed horse not knee-high to the man. Great, limpid eyes were startled in the miniature head—and then the creature had spun around and vanished.

RONALD STRATTON stared at the spot where it had been. He managed to get himself moving, managed to get to where he could look down upon the hoof-prints. The tracks were unmistakable. Three-toed, those were the traces of an Eohippus, of that forgotten ancestor of the horse extinct before man's first anthropoid progenitor learned to swing along arboreal highways by four clutching paws and a prehensile tail.

Stratton's scalp made a tight cap for his skull. His hands were out in a peculiar, thrusting gesture, as though he were trying to push away some dreadful thing that was closing in upon, him. What had happened to him? Where was he?

A scream sliced the forest stillness, a woman's scream, high and shrill and compact with terror. Stratton's head jerked up to it, to the swift threshing of someone running through the thicket. Something white flicked among the trees, took shape in the form of a running girl. Long blond braids streamed behind her, and her face was as white as the white robe fluttering about her slim form. Her fear-dilated eyes saw him as she went past. "Help me, I prithee," she screamed; and her archaic appeal was blotted out by a horrid, bestial roar blasting from leaf-veiled aisles whence she came, by the thunder of a far heavier body pursuing her.

The underbrush tossed in the grip of a whirling tornado, parted to the plunge of a huge, hairy creature who ran half-crouched and bellowing.

The American leaped for the monster, flailed frantic fists at a brutal, leathery visage. His blows pounded against rock-hard bone, pitifully ineffectual. Something struck him, catapulted him backward. For the first time he saw clearly the thing he had attacked, and amazement seared through him.

It—it wasn't a gorilla, despite the stiff black hair covering its big-thewed haunches, despite its chinless, flat-nosed, beetling-browed countenance. A ragged pelt was slung about its waist. It clutched a wooden-handled, flint-headed axe in one spatulate-fingered hand; and in its lurid, beady eyes there was a groping, grotesque sort of intelligence not quite bestial. It was a man, a man from out the dawn of time. A Neanderthal man, whose like had vanished from the earth countless eons ago.

The ape-man's black, thick lips snarled back from yellow fangs. His neckless throat pulsated, vented a nerve-shattering, insensate roar. Threat was fierce in that horrid ululation, but underlying the menace a singular note of inquiry seemed to signal a bewilderment in the creature's small brain as great as Stratton's own. That was what had checked its charge, what held it now, momentarily hesitant.

In that instant of reprieve Stratton heard the bush rustle behind him, felt a twitch at his right hand. His fingers closed on something hard that fitted into his palm.

"Mayhap this dagger will aid thee against the ogre," a whisper came to him. "This blade, and my prayers."

THE aborigine's bellow blasted again. He sprang, catapulted down upon Stratton, his flint axe arcing before him.

The youth's frantic side-spring saved his skull, but the Stone Age weapon hit his left shoulder, numbing it. Stratton struck out blindly with the dagger, felt its point strike flesh and sink sickeningly into it. Then the hairy body of his antagonist bore him down. He thudded appallingly to the ground.

Harsh hands clamped his throat, cut off breath. His lungs labored, tortured by lack of air. Blood roared in his ears, and his eyes bulged from their sockets.

And suddenly air pulled in between Stratton's teeth as the strangling hold on his throat relaxed. The insupportable mass crushing him was abruptly flaccid, lifeless. Fiery stabs cut Stratton's chest as he gasped in saving breaths. Instinctively he heaved off from himself the anthropoid's limp mass.

"Marry! Thou hast slain him with a single thrust of the poniard!" The girl's voice was thrilled, applauding. "See how his black blood doth flow!"

His vision cleared. The girl stood above him, briar-tears gashing her robe to reveal tantalizing glimpses of lissome curves. Her blue eyes danced with excitement in a face small-featured, red-lipped, somehow pagan in the upthrust of high cheekbones, in the blunt modeling of its tiny chin. Even in that moment Stratton's heart skipped a beat at the elfin beauty of that countenance.

"I wouldn't have had it to thrust if it wasn't for you," he grunted, struggling erect. "You've got a lot of sand, young lady."

She looked puzzled. "Sand? Prithee, what meanest thou?"

"That's American slang for courage." Why was she talking in that confoundedly queer lingo? Even if she was dressed up for a masquerade, what had happened here should have shaken her out of it.

The girl shrugged. "Nay, but thy speech groweth ever more strange. And thy garb, too, is passing queer." She gazed about her, her pupils widened with sudden fright. "What—what land is this, what forest?" she cried out.

His own bemusement swept back on Stratton. "I—I don't know," he faltered. "I was hoping you'd tell me that."

She stepped backward in awe. "By the Holy Rood, 'tis an enchantment some sorcerer hath cast upon us! Look you. But a moment hence I hurried with milady's message to her lover that Sir Aglavaine hath returned betimes from Arthur's court. Seeking to hasten back so that I might bend knee at vesper orisons, I dared cross the ancient mound that riseth betwixt the castle and Avebury Town. As I attained its crest some strange malaise o'ercame me; and then, and then—"

"Yes," Ron Stratton prompted. "What happened?"

"And then there were these trees about me and the fearsome face of yon ogre peered at me from among them. I fled. He pursued. I came upon thee and—and the rest thou knowest."

Stratton shook his head violently, as though to jar his brain into functioning. "Wait a minute. What's all this you're saying about Sir Aglavaine, Arthur's court, a castle? Are you kidding me?"

She looked at him dumbly, as though she did not understand. "Kidding?"

"All right. Skip it. I'm having trouble understanding you, too. What year do you think this is?"

"What year?" She backed farther, warily, as though she were about to dash away. "Forsooth, hath bemusement clouded thy accompt of time? 'Tis five hundred and a score years since Our Lord was born in Bethlehem."

LITTLE chill prickles scampered along Stratton's spine. She believed it! She believed that she was telling the truth. But—

His eyes slitted as his gaze left her, to shift from the corpse of the Neanderthal man to the tracks of the Eohippus, and back to this girl, who seemed to have stepped out of the pages of Malory's Mort d'Arthur, if his memory of paleontology did not fail him, at least a million years ranged between the tiny horse and himself. It was possible that the animal and the beast-man were survivals, by some inconceivable quirk of fate, from the misty ages in which they belonged. They couldn't tell him. But she could. She had. She told him that the present was to her A. D. 520. To him it was 1936. That meant—What did it mean?

"Everything's mixed up here," he groaned. "Time's all mixed up. It's as if the universe were the rim of a great wheel, whirling through Time. As if, somehow, we have left that rim, shot inward along different spokes whose outer ends are different years, far apart, and reached the wheel's axis where all the year-spokes join. The center point of the hub, that doesn't move at all through Time, because it is the center. Where there is no Time. Where the past and the present and the future are all one. A land, in some weird other dimension, where Time stands still."

2: Trapped By Flame

THE girl's lambent eyes flicked about, returned to him, "Marry," she sighed. "An' it doth appear to have been of no avail."

Ronald Stratton started. "What was of no avail?"

"The spell thou hast essayed. See, the woods still cluster around us, and Silbury Hill hath not reappeared."

In spite of his perturbation the youth grinned. "I don't blame you for thinking it some incantation. It sounds pretty goofy to me. Looks like we're going to be together for quite a while, so maybe we'd better get acquainted. What's your name?"

"I am called Elaise." She dipped in a graceful curtsey. "Tirewoman I am to Milady Melisante, spouse to Sir Aglavaine of Silbury Keep."

"I'm Ronald Stratton—Ronny to my friends."

"Ronny. It falleth trippingly from the tongue. Ronny."

"Sounds swell when you say it. Strikes me we'd better try to find some way out of here. I'm not hankering to spend the night in these woods. Might be damned unhealthy, judging from what we've seen here already."

"Whither thou goest I follow, Squire Ronny." She said it demurely, but he could have sworn there was a glint of amusement in the blue eyes over which her luxuriant lashes drooped. "Having saved my life from the ogre it is forfeit to thee. All I have and am is thine to command."

"The hell you say!" Stratton muttered. "Come on then." Was the minx laughing at him?

"Perchance thou mayst have need of this, Ronny," he heard her say behind him. He threw a glance backward over his shoulder, saw her tugging the dagger from the ape-man's breast, She got it out, started after him, wiping the blood from its blade with a handful of leaves. He shuddered at her callousness. Then he recalled the brawling, ribald, tempestuous age from which she came. Handling a gory dagger then was no more than cleaning a muddy tennis ball to the girl of now?

Then—Now. Those terms no longer had any meaning. The concepts of a dead past, a living present, a future yet unborn—all were false, utterly false. All Time exists simultaneously, in the same manner that all space exists simultaneously. Minutes, hours, years, centuries are merely measurements of location in terms of time; just as yards, miles, light-years are measurements of location in terms of space.

Space-time, time-space—the terms of the mathematical physicists, their theories that had seemed to Ronny Stratton's realistic mind so much fairy-tale nonsense, had suddenly become breathing truths. If he had only paid more attention to them, tried to understand them! Didn't Einstein talk about ether-warps, about eddies in the flux of space and time? Was there such an eddy on Silbury Hill, through which he had slipped into some alien dimension? Did the ancient Druids know it; was that why they had selected the spot for their savage rituals? Had they erected those monstrous circles to warn their charges from the very fate that had overtaken Elaise and himself?

"RONNY! Ronny!" The girl's cry recalled Stratton to awareness of his surroundings. "What enchanted domain is this?"

They were at the edge of the forest, at the edge of the plateau it covered. Ten feet from where they stood, the terrain dropped away in a precipitous, headlong descent.

Sheer down for a thousand feet the high cliff fell, and far below a great plain spread mile after mile to a vague and murky horizon, a limitless expanse of tumbled, grotesque rock. Queerly angular, strangely distorted, the tortured stone soared in needle-like spires toward the lurid sky, or lay strewn in the fractured fragments of some gigantic cataclysm; piled here in gigantic mounds, there flattened to jagged fields.

Nowhere in that far-flung tumulus was there any sign of verdure, nowhere the glint of water; the hint of human habitation. But it was not alone the infinite desolation of that vast vista that gave it the eerie, ominous cast of a nightmare landscape. Color ran riot there. Violent greens warred with oranges virulent as the venom of the cobra. Fiery scarlet streamed shrieking between the yellow of a finch's breast and blue cold as Polar ice.

"Ronny!" Elaise had shrunk against him. Stratton was abruptly conscious of the quivering warmth of her body against his, of the fragrance of her hair in his nostrils. "See there. What manner of beings are those that dwell in this outland of hell?" His arm went around her, drawing her closer still, but his gaze followed the gesture of her shaking hand. There was movement, just below. He saw them?

Apparently they had come out of some cavern in the face of the very cliff on whose brink he stood, and they were half walking, half crawling, as though seeking to take advantage of every bit of shelter the broken ground offered. Dwarfed though they were by the great height, Stratton could yet sense in their poses an odd combination of fear and aggressiveness. They were both hunter and hunted. They were stalking some as yet unseen enemy, dreading him and yet determined to attack him.

The American was by this time beyond astonishment, yet a chill prickle crawled his spine as he gazed down on the curious file. Their leader was a Roman centurion, the short skirt of his peplum swishing against swart thighs, breast and back protected by burnished armor, small round shield on one arm, stubby sword in the other.

He was followed by a squat, half-naked individual whose long blond hair and yellow, walrus mustachios set him off as one of the Britons whom Caesar's legions conquered. Behind came a gigantic, steel-capped Viking with strung draw-bow, then a hairy aborigine... Had the eddy on Silbury Hill plucked from out of the dead years, one of each race of England's long history to make up that small company? Jute, Pict, Saxon, they were all there, bound together with their common trait of cruel savagery!

THE shadow of a cloud drifted across the great plain. The Roman saw it, crouched suddenly low behind an emerald rock. The others dropped prone. Stratton was aware of a whirring sound. A flash of light darted across the field of his vision. The Briton—vanished!

Where he had lain was a small pit in the rock, its edges glowing red-hot!

The faint sound of a barked order came up to Stratton. The men he watched sprang up, dashed helter-skelter for the shelter of the cliff whence they came. Before they passed from sight two others had whiffed into nothingness with the appalling spontaneity of the first. The whirring was louder, seemed to beat all about the watchers on the cliff with some indescribable threat. Something was in the air, level with Stratton, an egg-shaped metallic object suspended there without visible support. It flashed on him that this was the source of the spark that he had seen smash three humans into nothingness. Elaise whimpered, watching the wingless flyer hover and then it was darting straight toward them!

Terror fanged the youth. His muscles exploded to throw him backward into the obscurity of the forest, carrying Elaise with him. His heel caught on a gnarled root and he sprawled, the girl on top of him. The whirring filled the forest with its menace. Stratton scrambled to his feet, jerked the girl erect. Side by side the two ran through the thicket, blindly, fear lending them wings, the fear of a terrible unknown from which they must escape. They plunged into a clearing.

A tree flared into flame, ahead of them. "This way," Stratton grunted, twisting to the right. Another forest giant was a column of fire, barring their passage. Behind, a third flamed.

"Oh-h-h," Elaise gasped. "The fiend ringeth us around with the flame of his breath. We are doomed."

They were surrounded by a roaring, torrid blaze. Heat beat in upon them, unendurable heat of an oven. Tongues of flame lapped toward them through the brush. They could not escape.

Stratton clutched the girl to him. "We're licked," he murmured. "We're licked, honey, before we start."

Her heart beat against his chest, her arms were around his neck. "We die, my Ronny," she cried. "But we die together."

"Together." What was there in the blue eyes looking up into his that quenched the despair surging in his blood, that sent a thrill of ecstasy through him? What did these red and luscious lips demand? "Together!" Stratton's own lips found her avid mouth, clung. It was almost pleasant—to—die—like this.

"Curious," a dry, shrill voice squeaked. "Curious indeed."

CHARRED, leafless trunks surrounded them, but the fire was gone. The ovoid flying-machine rested in the clearing, and a man stood before a black opening in its sleek side. "I must note the reaction," he continued, "really, I must note it at once." This must be a native, Stratton thought. Surely there was never anyone on earth like him. His bulbous head, with fish-belly-white scalp utterly hairless, accounted for a full half of his height. The rest—his shrunken body, clothed in some tight, iridescent fabric of spun metal; his spidery legs—seemed too fragile to support that great mass. Eyes large as small saucers stared unblinkingly out from under a bulging, immense forehead. His nostrils were gaping tunnels, his ears huge, flapping appendages, but his mouth was a tiny, toothless orifice. He was like some surrealist's caricature, like the spawn of some evil dream...

"No," the monstrosity squealed. "You are wrong. I am Flaton, an Earthman like yourself. Some forty centuries of evolution make the differences between us."

What the hell! The fellow had answered him. But he hadn't spoken! Stratton was sure he hadn't spoken!

"You need not have," the response came. "I know what you are thinking as well as you do yourself. Nor am I talking to you, in your sense of the word. What you think you hear is the projection of my thoughts into your brain. Evidently in your period, telepathy had not yet replaced oral communication.—What was that period?"

"Nineteen thirty—" Stratton started to say. He did not need to finish.

"The twentieth century, in your reckoning!" The American felt a reaction of pleased triumph from his interrogator! "What luck! Wait till Gershon sees you. The fool insists the Fifth Glacier was down as far as the Fiftieth parallel, and life there extinct, by the beginning of the eighteenth. When I produce you he will have to admit that I was right in setting the beginning of the last Ice Age much later... And this other is a female." His unfathomable gaze shifted to Elaise, and he fell silent. No! Evidently his eerie method of communication was focused by the direction in which he looked, for the girl was curtseying. "Five hundred and a score years since Our Lord's birth, master," she quavered. "An it please thee."

Another moment of silence, then she was speaking again. "I am hight Elaise, and this squire Ronny." It was like listening in on one side of a telephone conversation. She could not, of course, understand that she was not really hearing Flaton's questions. Stratton himself could not actually comprehend how it was accomplished, though, child of the Radio Age as he was, there was no magic in it for him. Were his thoughts exposed to the man of the future, he wondered, while the fellow's eyes were not on him? It might be important to know?

Looking carefully at the odd craft that had brought Flaton here, he thought: "Maybe he's more developed than I, but he's weaker. Physical development has been sacrificed to mental. I can break him in half with my fist. I'm going to try it. Now!"

Nothing happened. In the youth's wrists a pulse throbbed. There was limit, then, to Flaton's powers.

Elaise screamed. "No," she shrilled. "No! Thou canst not do that to me! The Virgin Mary forfend—"

STRATTON whirled to her. She was rigid, statuesque with terror. Her dilated eyes were fastened on Flaton's imperturbable countenance, but the fellow hadn't touched her, hadn't approached her.

"What is it, Elaise? What's scared you?"

She was shuddering within the protecting circle of his arms. "Didst not hear? Art thou once more bewitched?"

A cold chuckle within Stratton's skull was the echo of Flaton's cynical amusement. "Mankind no longer is divided into male and female, so I informed her that we should have to dissect her to confirm our records. Her reaction is curious?"

"You devil!" Stratton shouted, and leaped for him. Started to leap, abruptly he was without power to move, as his every nerve, his every cell, was shredded by unutterable anguish. Through a dancing haze of pain he saw a small, black cylinder in one of Flaton's tentacular hands, saw a peculiar green nimbus haloing the end that was pointed at him.

"Fool," the future-man's thought battered at his understanding. "If you were not the sole specimen of your era we have found here I should have disintegrated you before you could pass over a tenth of the space between us. You saw what happened to those on the plains below who were stalking one of our geological parties. A slightly increased pressure of my thumb and every molecule of your frame would he blasted into its component atoms."

Agony twisted through Stratton, knotting his muscles, wrenching at his sinews.

"Stop it!" he moaned. "Stop it! I can't stand it!"

The green nimbus flicked out. The excruciating torture relaxed, though his sinews still quivered with remembrance. "All this is a waste of time," Flaton said. "Come, both of you. Get aboard my stratocar. Quick, now."

Resistance was useless. Stratton turned his back to Flaton,

"We'll have to do what be says, Elaise. We can't fight him." He was between the girl and their captor, shielding her from that omniscient gaze of his. "Not now, anyway; but don't give up hope. I'll find a way out. Don't think about that when he's watching you. Don't think about anything except how helpless we are. We'll fool him yet."

3: Lair Of The Future-Men

ELAISE was like a small, frightened kitten huddling in Ronny Stratton's arms on the strange curved floor of Flaton's curious conveyance. That floor was of no metal Stratton had ever seen. Darting with tremendous speed through the air it had been silvery, but now he could see that it shimmered with ever-changing striations embracing the whole spectrum in their deep, variegated colors.

It was blood-warm to touch, too, and almost it seemed alive, vital with some force yet undreamed of in the twentieth century. Had the people of the future solved the obscure identity of energy with matter just dawning on the scientists of his present? Was this fabric fashioned of some element man and not God had created?

Flaton sprawled at ease in the bow of the sky-craft, his grotesque frame cushioned on a billowing, smoky sub-stance, cloudlike in appearance. Although no machinery was anywhere visible, his pencil-like fingers played along a serrated bank of tiny levers; and in a screen, placed just where he could watch it with a minimum of effort, the weird landscape of this weird space was blurred by projectile-like flight. He was taking them to others like himself. Was their advent here also accidental, or—

"No. We are an expedition sent to examine the specimens trapped here." Stratton was once more startled by the pat answer to his thought. "We are checking the fossil records of the rocks the Great Glacier left behind." Flaton's back was toward him. But a mirror to his right, the American saw now, brought to him a reflection of the prisoners. "History will be an exact science when we return."

"When we return!" Return was possible, then! The thought sank deep into Stratton's consciousness. If they could escape—Good Lord! He had forgotten! He fought frantically to make his mind a blank, to bar from it even the flicker of a plan that Flaton, with his uncanny powers, might read and forestall.

"I'm a damn fool to think escape is possible," he forced to the surface of his brain. "I'm as much in his power as the Neanderthal Man would be in mine if I had him handcuffed and chained, with a machine-gun trained on him. After all, Science must be served. Why should I object even to death if it will advance the knowledge of his wonderful civilization?"

Had he struck the right chord? A wordless communication from Flaton seemed to tell him so, although the future-man's gargoylesque visage betrayed not the slightest expression. It was sexless, soulless—neither cruel nor evil, but more sinister than both in its utter lack of emotion. There was no pity in the man, no mercy.

"I, am afraid," Elaise whimpered. "Oh, Ronny, I am dreadfully afraid. Whither doth he take us?"

"Hush, honey," Stratton whispered, pressing her quivering body to him. "There isn't any use in being afraid. We've got to take what comes, and take it smilingly. We can't do anything to avoid it."

IN the television screen the rushing terrain below was slowing, was becoming more distinct. Evidently they were reaching their destination end the landing was absorbing all of the future-man's attention. The varicolored rocks were taking on definite form. The stratocar was hovering over a circular pit in the plain which held a building of some sort.

They dipped lower still. Stratton could make out another grotesque creature like Flaton, staring up at them. Then they were within the rock-walled crater. It was that, he saw, rather than a pit.

So smoothly had the landing been accomplished it was not until Flaton rose that Stratton realized the stratocar was no longer moving. A wave of the future-man's tentacular arm and a hatchway opened in the vessel's side, apparently of its own motion.

"Get out," the voiceless command came. "We have arrived."

The surface upon which they stepped out was level and glass-smooth, as though the rock had been melted and poured into the cup of its stony walls? Ronald Stratton brought his eyes back to Flaton in time to catch his thought, addressed to the man who had awaited him.

"Wait till Gershon sees this one, Talus. A man from the twentieth century. How he will howl to discover his chronology errs by at least two hundred years."

"I am troubled," Talus replied. "Gershon and Frotal have sent no messages for three quarter-hours. Have you seen anything of them?"

Flaton was undisturbed. "They were being hunted by some barbarians near the cliff they went to explore. I turned those back with a few blasts of the disintegrator ray. Our colleagues are probably making discoveries so interesting that they forgot your request for periodic signals."

"They should not. I don't understand?"

"Naturally. Being merely a representative of the World League's Administration, you could not expect to understand how we scientists react to the acquisition of new knowledge."

Stratton sensed discord here, a schism between the practical men of the Earth of the future and the students. Forty thousand years, he mused, had not served to reconcile that ancient conflict.

"By the same token I am anxious to begin the examination of my own finds. Beside the twentieth century individual I have a female. Just think of that!"

Flaton flung around to Stratton and Elaise. "To the laboratory," he repeated the thought, making of it a command. "At once!"

His leveled ray-gun drove them before him, across the frozen lava of the stockade's floor, in through a high portal in the shimmering metal side of the structure at its center.

A pale blue luminance lit the interior, and the space seemed filled with a pounding, mechanical throbbing. Some sort of machine bulked before Stratton. No part of the complicated device moved, yet somehow it seemed instinct with the same sort of life as had animated the fabric of the stratocar.

THE door of the laboratory was narrow. Stratton went through first. In a larger chamber he glimpsed curious racks on which gleaming instruments were ominously ranged, high panels studded by glowing lights, a maze of tangled cables.

There was something terrifying about all this, some aura of the same dispassionate cruelty he had felt, once, in the experiment room of a naturalist friend whose skinned frogs and guinea-pigs had twitched to the galvanic false-face of searching electrodes'. They had been bundles of gory flesh, like the scarlet horror on a table near a second door in the farther wall. But that was—that had been a man!

"No," Elaise groaned, behind him. "No. I will not—" Her voice choked off.

Stratton whirled, The girl was writhing in the grip of Flaton's macaber weapon, her dear face twisted out of all semblance to humanity by the torture Stratton himself had found unendurable.

The cylinder's green nimbus blinked out and he caught Flaton's grim order. "Disrobe, or you shall feel the agony again. Strip off your garb, female."

Flaton's great eyes flicked to Stratton, and the youth read his appalling intention. Wrath lightninged through him, obliterating fear. He leapt to his feet in a long low dive, his arms flailing ahead of him in a desperate stab at the future-mans spindly legs.

Because instinct, and not thought, inspired that mad attack, Flaton was not warned of it in time to bring his weapon to bear on the berserk youth. Stratton's shoulder crashed against the fellow's frail limbs. They snapped at the impact, and Flaton went down under the mad charge. Paper-thin bones crunched under his blow. Abruptly he realized he was pummeling a squashed thing that did not move, a thing out of which all life had expired.

"Ronny," Elaise was crying. "Here, Ronny. His wand of magic!"

Stratton pushed himself erect, shuddering now with revulsion from the touch of that which had been the fruit of all mankind's long travail, shaking still with the fury that had fired him to his unexpected triumph. Elaise was thrusting at him the black cylinder of the disintegrator ray. He snatched it from her, found the thumb-button that would release its fearful energy.

Somewhere outside someone called: "Flaton! Come quickly. I need your help. The barbarians attack us!"

4: The Siege Of The Primitives

"WHAT now?" Stratton groaned, twisting to the door. The portal, sliding open, revealed Talus, waving filamentary arms in a paroxysm of apprehension.

"Hold it," the American said grimly. "As you are! If you move, I'll ray you!"

"Flaton—dead—incredible! He has the ray-gun!" Talus' thoughts were a jumble of astonishment at the pulped remnant of his companion, of terror of the weapon Stratton held. "He will disintegrate me before I can draw my own. Defeated—from within and without. I should not have come—"

"Damn right you shouldn't," Stratton interjected. This telepathy business had its points, he thought. He knew he was master of the situation now. "What's going on out there?"

"Our screen scans the plain for a half-mile around. I have seen them approaching—the barbarians. They are converging on all sides. They will destroy us."

"That's lovely! How about our getting away in the stratocar?"

"I do not know how to navigate it."

"That means we've got to fight them off. Can we?"

"One man on each side of the wall, with our weapons we should have been impregnable. But you have killed Flaton—"

"Never mind that. I'll make a dicker with you. You take one side, I'll take the other. You ought to be smart enough to see that we've got to play fair with each other or we both lose out. How about it?"

"Done!"

Stratton couldn't distinguish any reservation in the man's mind. Not just now. Afterwards he might change. "Are there any more of these ray-guns around?"

"Another in the cabinet to the left. That one—"

"Elaise," Stratton threw over his shoulder. "There's a magic wand, as you call it, in that closet on this side of me. Get it. You work it by pushing that little thing on its side. You come out with us, stay in the center of the blockade and don't take your eyes off this beauty. If you hear him think anything even a little bit hostile to me or you, let him have it. All the way down!" Then, to Talus, "You get that, don't you?"

"I understand." He was thoroughly cowed. "I shall give her no cause to disintegrate me. But we must hurry, or they will be over the wall.

"Let's go!"

THERE were steps in the sides of the stockade wall. Atop it was a runway protected by a rampart. If there were only four of the future-men, Stratton thought, they must have been here a long time to have built this fortress. Then he saw that it was of the same glass-like consistency as the floor within. He tested the ray on it.

Its button pushed halfway down, the green halo formed around its end, but there was no visible effect on the fused rock. A little further. The green deepened to a brilliant dazzle that extended in a tight beam to the spot at which he aimed. The stone glowed red, then white. It melted, ran in little streamlets down the slick sides of the little wall. That was what they had done! They had melted the solid stone to make their lair.

"Gosh!" Stratton exclaimed, "just think what full power would do to a man!" Then he recalled that he had seen just that? But he was forgetting what he was here for.

He could just see over the rampart. The piebald space outside was vacant. As far as his vision reached, nothing moved. Had Talus tricked him? A swift glance over his shoulder showed him the future-man across the small space, peering intently over the barricade on his side. Elaise was tense beside the stratocar, her gaze un-waveringly on their strange ally, the ray-gun clutched in her small hand and focused on him. Admiration surged up in Stratton. She might be untaught, superstitious, but there was nothing lacking in her courage!

A tiny clink of metal against stone spun Stratton around. Had something dodged behind that boulder, out there?

Twanng! A harp-note sounded somewhere. Something zipped through the air, thudded against the rock wall below him. Again—twanng!—zzzip—thud! This time it struck sparks from the rampart-top a foot to Stratton's left, fell over onto the foot-way. It was an arrow, flint-tipped. The American ducked below the shielding stone, looked from the dart to the cylinder he held. Ages between these two weapons—but that arrow also could kill, and without a target his ray was useless.

His careless exposure of himself had given some marksman his range. Stratton ran, crouching low, along the wall. Popped up for another look. A shambling Dawn-man, pelt-girdled, dodged out from behind a rock, his ferocious countenance more bestial than human. The fellow poised a flint-tipped javelin for the throw. Stratton took snap aim, thumbed his ray-gun's trigger. The dart-hurler whiffed into nothingness.

Revulsion twisted at the pit of the American's stomach, horror at the thing he had done. This death he dealt was worse than death itself. The most savage of warriors buried their dead and their enemy's dead, but he was leaving nothing to bury.

A wail rose into the dimness, hollow and somehow eerie with its keening of the dreadfully dead. A flaxen-haired youth, in leather jerkin and forest-green breeches, was suddenly visible. His longbow was stretched to the tip-point of a feathered arrow and his keen, eager eyes scanned the wall for a mark. Stratton's arm jerked up—but he could not bring himself to press the lethal button.

"Wait," he yelled. "Wait!" There was in him some inchoate realization that the bowman was far nearer kin to him than the callous man of the future, that they two should be fighting shoulder to shoulder in a common cause. "Wait! I—"

The twang of the loosed bowstring cut him short. His ray caught the arrow in midair, sparked it into non-existence. The beam melted a lurid, angry pit just in front of the archer, and the yellow-headed Saxon sprang back to safe concealment.

IF he could only get them to listen, Ronald Stratton thought desperately; if he could only get them to understand that he was not of the people who had come there to capture them and torture them.

Metal clanged, out there, and abruptly another figure was striding through the fantastic landscape of the Timeless Zone. A mailed knight, helmeted and visored, he came on jauntily, secure in the gleaming armor he could not deem other than invulnerable. His great, two-handed sword flashed bloodily in the fading light.

"Hey, you," Stratton called. "Hold up. Listen a minute. I don't want to kill you. Listen to me!"

The knight did not pause as he bellowed, "Ho, caitiff! Though thou art craven, Sir Sanguinor yields thee no quarter. Defend thyself!"

"You damn fool!" Stratton snarled, exasperatedly. "I want to—" The dazzle of Talus's weapon hissed past him. Out there, where the knight had been, a pockmark in the plain glowed redly, a molten pockmark where a gallant man-at-arms was dispersed into myriad scattered atoms.

"Ronny," Elaise screamed. "Ronny."

Stratton twisted to her. An ape-visaged aborigine, gigantic, was bringing down a great, stone-headed mace to demolish the shrieking girl. Stratton's flashing beam caught him, blasted him into extinction. The American left the rampart in a great leap, thudded down beside the cringing girl. A chorused jabbering of rage pulled his gaze to the farther wall. Forms were surging over it—ravening, beast-like forms.

The American knew now that the die was cast. No chance for a truce now, for talk. The future-man's ray swept clear the crowded wall. Swept it clear of swarthy, runted Picts; of long-haired, long-bearded dwarfs of the ancient moors; of all the surging, fierce apparitions of a dreamlike past. But others, and still others, took their place: Roman legionnaires, shaggy-bearded Druids, archers who might have fought with Henry of Navarre at Poictiers, a longbowman in the forest green of Robin Hood's gay band. Indomitably they came on and the silent death of Talus's fearful beam scythed them into oblivion.

A hurled spear ripped Stratton's thigh, sent agony searing through him. An arrow sliced his scalp. Talus gave vent to a high, piercing scream. A swift glance showed that his left arm was carried away. Grotesque, incredible in the gathering darkness, he carried on.

"Nerve!" the American exclaimed. "By jingo, he's got nerve!" A thrill ran through him, a tingling thrill of pride in the Race. All of these weirdly assorted participants in the uncanny, nightmare struggle staged in the dying luminance of an outer world were somehow ennobled by that high quality of courage. Ape-man from the fens of the immemorial past, Jute and Druid and knight, Roman and hook-nosed Norman seaman, girl of the sixth century, man of the twentieth, man of the four hundredth—not one of them craven. Above them all fluttered the pennant of bravery that in all the ages must distinguish man from beast.

SUDDENLY the battle was over. Suddenly there were no longer any more attackers for the fearful ray to smite with its green oblivion. Ron Stratton slumped wearily, exhausted, feeling the agony of his wounds.

"They're licked, Elaise," he gasped. "They're licked." Not the least uncanny feature of the uncanny fight was that, now that it was ended, so little remained to show that there had been a fight. "All gone," Stratton groaned. "All—"

"You're wrong," Talus's message squealed in his brain. "There are still others of them out there. I can sense their presence, though they are too far off for me to make out their thoughts." The fellow swore softly.

"The devil!" Stratton pulled himself to the rampart again, peered out once more into the tumulus whence the savage raid had come. Silence brooded, gravelike, among the fantastic rocks. It was a dead world he looked at, shrouded in a mournful dusk. A dead, unpeopled world. "I don't see anyone."

"They are there, nevertheless," he heard. "Hidden to plot a new attack—" That thought broke off; another, took its place. "At last! Gershon and Frotal—"

The thought blanked out, Talus had coiled it, but a whirring sound, faint, out of the almost lightless sky, came to Stratton.

The two missing future-men were coming back.

5:  The Primitives Take The Crater

STRATTON saw suddenly a tremendous reaching beam arc against the vault of the maroon-shaded sky; saw a rock flick from its end to hurtle and crash devastatingly against the stockade's facade.

This was a catapult, he realized, a Roman catapult, heavy artillery of Caesar's legions. Some military genius was directing the siege. But the future-man was equal to the new threat. The catapult's huge throwing beam flared suddenly into flame as the disintegrator ray struck it.

Above that pillar of fire, high above and miles distant, a glowing speck showed against the deep maroon of the sky. The same electric shimmer flowed in the skin of Flaton's stratocar. If only Stratton knew how to fly that—

What good, while Frotal and Gershon were aloft to ride him down? Better death at the hands of the barbarians than what they would do to Elaise and himself. Stratton's arm jerked up, brought to bear pointblank on Talus's spidery form. He pressed the button halfway.

The future-man was rigid, quivering in the clutch of that dreadful force.

"Take his wand, Elaise," Stratton yelled. "Quick."

No words sounded in his brain, telepathed from the future-man, but pain and terror impacted there in a chaos of transferred anguish. The girl sprang unhesitantly up the steps to the runway. Stratton flicked off his beam for the instant she needed to snatch away Talus's ray-gun, flicked it on again as Elaise turned questioningly toward him.

"Get into the thing in which we came here," was his next order, "and watch the hole in the wall. If anyone starts to come through, ray him down."

"Aye, Ronny, my love," she answered him. "I haste to do thy will."

"Now, you," Stratton addressed Talus, aloud.

"Which way shall I move my thumb, up or down? Will you do just as I say, or do I blot you out?"

There was acquiescence in the message that came to him, cringing, tortured appeal. Stratton relaxed. "Come down and turn off the machine in there that holds up the stratocar."

"But you'll kill them," the agonized protest reached him. "They will fall."

"That's just what I've got in mind. Going to do what I say, or do I start with you?"

Talus's actions replied for him. He was scrambling down the wall. Stratton leaped down, kept right behind him. The future-man shambled into the powerhouse. The American threw a quick glance up into the sky. That ominous flier was nearer, much nearer. Shadowy forms were moving out there on the plain. All the sinister forces of this sinister land were closing in.

"Watch it, Elaise," he called and followed Talus into the building. "Hurry up," he flung at the cowed creature. "Turn it off."

The whir of the approaching flier came to him, high and angry now, like the irate whir of a worker bee whose hive is being attacked. Talus did something—and the whir was gone.

Stratton faced about. Through the open door he could see the sky. A star fell, leaving a long wake of electric flame behind it. The plain spurted a fountain of sparks, green and red and golden. Then there was only darkness out there?

ONLY darkness and the long darting flares from Elaise's ray-guns as she fought off the oncoming hordes. Killing, killing. God, how weary he was of killing! Those poor fellows didn't know what it was all about. They knew only that strange creatures had come here to capture and torture and slay—and that they must fight to save themselves. Stratton jerked around.

"Turn on the power again."

Talus obeyed, thinking, "It won't do any good. The scientists are gone. No one, now, is left who knows how to fly the stratocar. The charges of the ray-guns will soon be exhausted and then—the end."

"Oh, yeah?" Stratton gritted. "I've got an idea. Come on, let's get into the flier and try it out."

"Ronny," Elaise screamed. "The Wands hath lost their magic, We are lost."

"Coming, honey. Coming." He grabbed Talus by his one remaining arm, fairly hauled him to the flying machine, threw him into it, leaped in after him. He remembered the motions of Flaton's arms that had closed and opened the hatchway. Clumsily he imitated them. Elation leaped up in him as the hatch cover slid closed.

He twisted. Talus lay almost unconscious on the floor. Elaise stood above the future-man, staring fearfully at the view-screen above the control levers. Mirrored in it was the breached wall of the stockade; through, the gap, Stratton could see the dusk-shrouded figures crawling in, always in. Till the last man was gone they would persist in their attack, not intelligent enough to realize how hopeless it was.

"Talus," Stratton shouted. "You think you don't know how this thing works, but you must have been in them often. You must have watched the pilots manipulate them, and what you saw is deep down in your subconscious. Don't think. Don't try to remember. Just try to picture Flaton, for instance, at some moment he was taking off."

"I cannot," the fellow's despairing whimper came to him. "I cannot remember."

"You've got to, man! Try. Try hard!"

Silence fell in the round-walled cubicle, a thick silence that seemed to quiver with tension. Stratton stared at the future-man, concentrating on his thoughts, on that storehouse of forgotten but never eradicated brain-impressions the psychologists call subconscious memory.

No words came to him, but pictures seemed to form on his retina, pictures like the hazy visions of a dream. They grew more definite in outline. He saw Flaton resting on his grey cloud cushion. He saw the view-screen in front of him. It was a porthole looking out on a platform thronged with hundreds of creatures in the nightmarish shapes of the world of the future. Silhouetted against a blue sky were towering pinnacles of gleaming crystal, fairylike highways leaping from facade to facade in a gossamer arabesque, clouds of ovoid stratocars?

The view-screen drifted upward and he saw the lever-banks. Thin, boneless fingers reached out, pushed one down in its short slot. In the view-screen the crowded platform shot down.

"I have it!" Stratton shouted, and leaped to the bow of the stratocar. He glimpsed the real view-screen, glimpsed a steel-capped Viking rushing in through it, a crowd of others behind him. His shaking hand found a lever, pushed it down.

The uprush of the stratocar flung him down on Talus, crushing the future-man as Stratton had crushed Flaton in his irate onslaught. But the flier was rising. The crater was dwindling in the television screen, was once more a pit in the plain's boundaryless surface.

Ronald Stratton struggled back to the control levers. "I've got to stop this or we'll keep on going up forever." Talus was dead, could not help him any longer. He pushed the tiny handle back into the central point of its slot. The precipitate rise stopped; the stratocar hovered, motionless in the air.

Stratton stared at the control board. He saw now that the switch lifting the stratocar was the topmost of a vertical row of three, that to left and right of the central lever there were two more.

"It looks simple enough," he muttered, "now that I've got a starting point. Top— up. Bottom— down. Middle— forward. Left— left. Right— right. Let's try it. I'll push down the middle one. Here goes!"

THE craft leaped forward. The problem was solved! He could fly the stratocar. But where? Where in this terrible place was safety for him? For Elaise?

"Look, Ronny!" the girl exclaimed. "It waxeth light again. The night here is indeed very short."

The strange red glow that passed here for day was growing in the screen. "It's just some kind of fluctuation of the light, sweetheart," Stratton thought aloud. "You see, there could not really be any day or night here because there isn't any Time."

Below, the eerily colored plain was visible once more, stretching undisturbed to a featureless horizon. No. There, straight ahead, something bulked against the lurid sky, a familiar, grateful green margining its upper edge.

"How would you like to come home with me, Elaise?" Stratton whispered. "Home to England?"

"Ronny!" She was wordless, but her arms around his neck, her kiss on his cheek, was enough.

"All right," he said. "Here goes."

The stratocar came down in the clearing, where Flaton had captured them. Stratton stepped out of it, helped Elaise to descend. They turned shuddering away from the gruesome remnants of the last of the future-men.

"We came from that direction," Stratton Said. "Maybe if we go back there we'll find the eddy once again."

"Whither thou goest I will go," Elaine murmured. "I am thine, my knight, soul and body?"

"Not more than I'm yours, honey. Remember that when we get back to 1936. Come on."

The underbrush rustled against their knees, the trees whispered overhead. They passed the still body of the Neanderthal Man. Then—a wall confronted them, a wall of hazy, swirling nothingness.

"Here goes! Together does it, Elaise, One—two—three!" His arm around her warm waist, Ronald Stratton stepped into the haze.

6:  Through The Eddy

IT was as if he had walked over the brink of an abyss, save that he did not fall. He was standing on the gentle slope of Silbury Hill. A great monolith loomed above him, black and gaunt against a dusk sky grey and haunting with the death of day. Not a minute, not a second had elapsed since he had taken the fateful step in the other direction.

"Look, Elaine." Ronald Stratton said. "Look down there. See the spire of Avebury Church? We can find a minister there, to wed us." She didn't answer.

"Elaise!" he said sharply, turning to her. She wasn't there beside him. She wasn't anywhere?

"Elaise!"

But she had walked into the eddy, close against him. She must have walked into it. What had happened? Where was she, the girl he had found in the Timeless Zone, who had fought so bravely by his side? The girl he had learned to love, the blue-eyed, fair-haired girl from the days of King Arthur?

From the days? Abruptly he understood. He remembered his first explanation of their strange adventure. "We've shot along the year-spokes of that great wheel, each from our own time, and met here at the center?" The reverse, too, was true. Returning, they had each gone back along his own year-spoke, he to 1936, she to A. D. 520. Some vibration of their cosmos, some esoteric, unknown quality, had provided for that. They were fourteen centuries apart.

Ronald Stratton started slowly down the hill, descending toward the valley whose moor was already dark with the gloom of night. Little stars sprinkled it, lights in the homes of people like himself. Of people of the twentieth century. Above them, the red and green winglights of an airplane drifted across the dusk.

"I don't care how advanced your era is; if you haven't got love, I pity you." He had said that to Flaton. "It's the greatest thing in life."

Stratton halted, turned back to the monumental double-ring the Druids had built to warn their people of the terrible thing that lay within. Abruptly he was running back to the high stone that marked the boundary of the eddy. He stopped on its very edge.

"Elaise!" he cried into that dread maelstrom of haze. "Elaise!"

Mad! He would be mad to plunge back into it. She wouldn't be there, in the forest. She was hastening down Silbury Hill, fourteen hundred years ago so as not to be late for evening prayers. She—

"Ronny!"

Her voice came out of the mists. He hadn't heard it, couldn't have heard it, across fourteen centuries. He was mad!

"Ronny!"

"I'm coming, Elaise. Wait for me! I'm coming!"

ABOVE a forest of tall and ancient oaks a lurid sky bent its eerie dome. A tiny horse, three-toed and knee-high to a full-grown man, peered through the underbrush at the couple walking, hand in hand, into the lowering, threatening future of the Land Where Time Stood Still. Hand in hand, heart to heart, the man of the twentieth century and the maid of the sixth went, together, into the Unknown.

____________________________

4: The Lanson Screen

Thrilling Wonder Stories December 1936

The best thing about Lanson's defensive energy screen was that it was utterly impervious― and the worst thing, too

1

HARRY OSBORN, First Lieutenant U. S. Army Air Corps, banked his wide-winged bombing plane in an easy, swooping curve. In the distance New York's white pinnacles caught the sun above a blue-gray billowing of twilight ground-haze. A faint smile lifted the corners of his lips as he glanced overside, saw a train crawl along shining rails and come to a halt. Brown dots appeared from the passenger car behind its locomotive and clustered in ordered confusion about the other oblong that completed the train's complement.

What appeared from his altitude to be a rather large pocket-handkerchief slid from the car and spread out on the grass. A metal tube glittered in the sun, came into motion, swivelling to the east. It looked like a cap-pistol, but Osborn knew it to be an eighteen-inch railroad gun.

He slanted down through lambent air. The terrain below was flat, lushly green. It was entirely vacant save at the very center of its five-mile sweep of marsh. Here a small hut was visible in the middle of a hundred-yard area ringed by a water-filled moat.

Two manikins stood before the structure. One was clothed in o.d., the other in black. The civilian's tiny arms gesticulated, and he went into the house. The army man moved sharply into an automobile and sped in the direction of the waiting artillery train.

"Five minutes to zero, Harry." The voice of Jim Raynes, his observer, sounded in the pilot's earphones, "What's the dope?"

"Target practice, Jim. We're to spot for the railroad gun and then we're to bomb. The target is—Good Lord!"

The plane wabbled with Osborn's sudden jerk on its stick, steadied. "Harry!" Raynes exclaimed. "What is it, Harry?"

"The target's that house down there. There's a man inside it. I saw him go in."

"The hell! What's the big idea?"

"Search me. There's no mistake though. Orders say 'absolute secrecy is to be maintained by all participants in this maneuver as to anything they may observe...'"

"Maybe it's an execution. Something special. Maybe―"

"...and this order is to be obeyed to the letter no matter what the apparent consequences," Osborn finished. "General Darius Thompson signed it personally, not 'by direction.' Tie that, will you?"

"I can't. But― it's orders."

Osborn levelled out, got his eyes focussed on the astounding target.

Suddenly there was nothing within the watery circle. Not blackness, or a deep hole, or anything similarly startling but understandable. It was as if a blind spot had suddenly developed in his own visual organs so that he could not see what there was at that particular point, although the wide green expanse of the swampy plain was elsewhere clear and distinct.

A KEY SCRAPED in the door of a third-floor flat on Amsterdam Avenue. Junior's two-year-old legs betrayed him and he sprawled headlong on the threadbare rug in the little foyer.

John Sims bent to his first-born, tossed him into the air, caught him and chuckled at the chubby, dirt-grimed face. He'd been tired as the devil a moment before. But now—

June Sims was flushed from the heat of the kitchen range, but her black hair was neat and a crisply ironed house-dress outlined her young slim figure. Junior was a warm bundle against her breasts as she kissed John.

"You're early, dear. I'm glad."

"Me too. What's for supper?"

"Pot roast." June's hazel eyes danced. "Johnny, mother phoned. She's going to come over tomorrow night to take care of Junior so that we can go out and celebrate your birthday."

"That's right! Tomorrow is May ninth!"

"Yes. Listen, I have it all planned. 'Alone With Love' is playing at the Audubon. We'll see that, and then splurge with chow mein. I've saved two dollars out of the house money just for that."

"You have! Maybe you'd better get yourself a bat. I saw an ad―"

"Nothing doing. We're going to celebrate! You go downtown." And so on, and on...

"They're starting, Harry."

Raynes' businesslike crispness somewhat eased Lieutenant Osborn's feeling that something uncanny was happening down there and his hand was steady as be jerked the stick to cope with the bump of the big gun's discharge. A dirt mushroom sprouted in the field.

"Short, two-tenths. Right, four point three," Jim intoned, correcting the range.

A white panel on the ground acknowledged his message. The cannon fired again and slid back in the oil-checked motion of its recoil.

"Over a tenth. Center."

The target was bracketed, the next try must be a hit. Harry banked, levelled out. The brown dots that were the gunners jerked about feverishly, reloading. Whatever it was that obscured his vision of the shack would be smashed in a moment now.

The gunners were clear. The pilot saw an officer's arm drop in signal to fire. Yellow light flickered from the big rifle. Osborn imagined he saw the projectile arc just under his plane. His eye flicked to where that house should be.

And nothing happened! No geyser of dirt to show a miss, no dispersal of that annoying blind spot. Had the gun misfired?

Wait? What was that black thing gliding in mid-air, sliding slowly, then more rapidly toward the ground? The shell that could pierce ten inches of armor was incredibly falling along what seemed the surface of an invisible hemisphere.

It reached the grass and exploded with the contact. The earth it threw up spattered against― nothing. Why hadn't the shell exploded on contact with whatever had stopped it? What was going on down there?

"I― I can't make a report, sir." There was a quiver in Jim's phlegmatic voice. Even his aplomb had now been pierced. "I think it would have been a hit, but―"

Again and again the great gun fired. Osborn and Raynes, got the signal to go ahead, dropped five three-hundred-pound bombs point-blank on the mysterious nothingness. The area around the circular canal was pitted, excavated, scarred as No Man's Land had never been.

Aviation Lieutenant Harry Osborn flew back to Mitchell Field in the gathering dusk. His young head was full of dizzy visions. Armies, cities, a whole nation blanketed from attack by invisibility. Spheres of nothingness driving deep into enemy territory, impregnable.

It was good to be alive, and in the old uniform, on this eighth day of May in 1937.

2

IN THE TEA ROOM of the Ritz-Plaza, the violins of Ben Donnie's orchestra sobbed to the end of a melodic waltz. Anita Harrison-Smith fingered a tiny liqueur glass nervously.

"I'm afraid, Ted. What if he suspects, and―"

The long-fingered hand of the man whose black eyes burned so into hers fisted on the cloth.

"Afraid. That has been always the trouble with you, Nita. You have always been afraid to grasp happiness. Well, I can't make you do it. But I've told you that I'm sick of this hole-and-corner business. If you don't come with me tomorrow, as we have planned, I go alone. You will never see me again."

The woman's face went white and she gasped.

"No! I couldn't bear that. I'll come, Ted. I'll come."

Van Norden's sharp, dark features were expressionless, but there was faint triumph in the sly purr of his voice.

"Have you got it straight? The Marechal Foch sails at midnight tomorrow from Pier 57, foot of West Fifteenth Street. You must get away from the Gellert dance not later than eleven-thirty. I'll meet you at the pier, but if there is a slip-up remember that your name is Sloane. Anita Sloane. I have everything ready, stateroom, passports, trunks packed with everything you can possibly need. You have nothing to do but get there. Whether you do or not I'll sail. And never come back."

"I'll be there," she breathed.

"Good girl. Tomorrow is the ninth. By the nineteenth we will be in Venice."

GENERAL Darius Thompson stood at the side of his olive-green Cadillac and looked at his watch. The bombing plane was a vanishing sky-speck just above the horizon, the railroad-gun had chugged back toward its base. He was alone under the loom of that sphere of nothingness against which the army's most powerful weapons had battered in sheer futility. It existed. It was real. Unbelievably.

A man was in the doorway of the flimsy but that had been the target of the shells. Quarter-inch lenses made his bulging eyes huge; his high-domed head was hairless and putty-colored; his body was obscenely fat. Professor Henry Lanson gave one the impression that he was somehow less than human, that he was a slug uncovered beneath an overturned rock. But his accession to the Columbia University faculty had been front-page news and the signal for much academic gloating.

"Well?" From gross lips the word plopped into the warm air like a clod into mud. "What do you think now, my dear General? Against my Screen your biggest shells were as puffballs. Yes? Your most gigantic bombs as thistledown. You thought me utterly insane when I insisted on remaining within." The scientist grinned, humorlessly. "What do you think now?"

Thompson shook his grizzled head, as if to rid it of a nightmare. "You took an awful chance. Suppose it had cracked."

"Cracked! In the name of Planck cannot you understand that the Lanson Screen is not matter that can crack?" The other spread veined, pudgy hands. "It is the negation of all energy, a dimensionless shell through which energy cannot penetrate. And since matter is a form of energy-" The physicist checked himself, shrugged. "But what's the use? I cannot expect you to understand. Besides myself there are perhaps a dozen in the world who could comprehend, and none is an American. Enough for you to know that I had to be inside to operate the B machine that cut the negative force the A apparatus set up. From outside it could not be done. The Screen would have remained forever and you would not be convinced there had been no effect of your bombardment within it."

"Could you not have managed some remote control device, some way of working your B machine from outside?"

"Lord, but you military men are stupid!" the physicist burst out exasperatedly. "Don't you understand yet that once the Lanson Screen is erected all within is, as absolutely cut off from the rest of the universe as if it were a different space, a different dimension? Nothing can penetrate within— electricity, wireless, the cosmic rays, the sun's radiations. Nothing!"

"Then if a city were covered by it, as you suggest, there would be no means of communication with the outside?"

"That is correct."

"If knowledge of this were universal there could be no more war." Thompson's gray eyes lifted and met the other's. A momentary silence intervened while a message flashed between these two so diverse characters. Then the general went on. "But if it were the exclusive property of a single nation that nation could become master of the world."

Lanson nodded. His voice betrayed knowledge of the rapprochement established in that single, long glance. "If I published my results I should gain very little from it. But if I sell it to one power it is worth almost anything I choose to demand. That is why I have worked at it alone. That is why I have never set the details down on paper, to be stolen. After I have sold the invention to you secrecy will be your concern, but till you meet my terms all knowledge of how I produce the effect remains here in my brain." Lanson tapped his clifflike brow. "Here and nowhere else."

"After we purchase it you might still sell your device to others."

"With a million dollars in hand I shall have no temptation to do so. No one could want, or use, more. That is one reason why you should be willing to recommend its payment."

The general shrugged. "I can get it for you when I am convinced that you can veil an entire city as you did this one small house. It seems to me impossible, or so tremendous a task, requiring such huge installations, such vast power, that it would be forbiddingly costly."

The physicist's grating, short laugh was contemptuous. "I'll shield New York for you with the same machine I used here, with the same power storage batteries not larger than those in your car. Their energy is needed, for only an instant, to start the complex functioning of forces whose result you have just witnessed. I'll erect a screen for you about Manhattan Island, an ellipsoid as high and as deep as the least axis of the enclosing rivers. Will that satisfy you?"

"If you can do it, and I cannot blast through, it will. When can you get ready?"

"As soon as I can move my machines to the required location, and set them up. Tomorrow night, if you wish."

"Very well. What help do you require?

"Only an army truck to convey my apparatus, and, since I will use the rivers as a delimiting guide for the screen, a place near the water to set it up."

The general was eager now, eager as the other. "I'll order a truck out here at once. And there is an army pier at West One Hundred and Thirtieth Street that you can use. I'll see that it is made ready for you."

3

MIDNIGHT of May eighth, 1937. An army truck noses into the Holland Tunnel. On its flat bed are two tarpaulin-covered bulks, machinery of some sort. Its driver is crowded against his wheel by the rotund form of a blackclad civilian whose chins hang in great folds on his stained shirt and whose bulging eyes glow with a strange excitement behind thick lenses. The truck comes out on Hudson Street and turns north.

Tenth Avenue is alive as puffing trains bring the city's food for tomorrow. A herd of bewildered cattle file into an abattoir. West End Avenue's apartment houses are asleep. Under the Riverside Viaduct a milk plant is alight and white tank trucks rumble under its long canopy. At One Hundred and Twenty-ninth Street the army van waits for a mile-long refrigerator car, loaded with fruit from California, to clear the tracks it must cross. The way is cleared. The truck thunders across cobbles and steel, vanishes within the dark maw of a silent pier.

Two blocks eastward a lighted subway train crawls out on its trestle for a breath of air, pauses fleetingly, dives underground again like a monstrous serpent seeking its burrow. Above the southward course of that burrow midtown Broadway is a streak of vari-colored illumination, exploding into frantic coruscation and raucous clamor at Forty-seventh Street. Crowds surge on sidewalks, in shrieking cabs, private cars; pleasure seekers with grim, intent faces rushing to grills, night clubs; rushing home, rushing as if life must end before they can snatch enough of it from greedy Time. Blare of the latest swing tune sets the rhythm for them from a loud-speaker over the garish entrance of a so-called music store.

Time writes its endless tale in letters of fire drifting along a mourning band around Time's own tower.

MARKET CLOSES STRONG TWO POINTS UP PRESIDENT ANNOUNCES RECOVERY ACCOMPLISHED CHAMPION CONFIDENT OF VICTORY FRIDAY HITLER DEFIES LEAGUE POLICE WILL SMASH DOCK RACKET SAYS VALENTINE GIANTS WIN...

There is no Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin written on that slender wall for sonte prophet to read.

Felix Hammond knots the gold sash rope of his black silk dressing gown. His satin slippers make no sound as they cross the thick pile of the glowing Kermanshah on the floor of his study to a darkly brooding Italian Renaissance secretary. He fumbles in the drawer for a silent moment, pulls out a book whose tooled-leather cover should be in some museum. He sits down, opens the book.

Minuscular, neat writing fills page after page. Hammond reads an entry. Something that might be a smile flits across his ascetic countenance. His bloodless lips wince at another item. He riffles the sheets rapidly to the first blank space, reaches for a fountain pen and starts writing.

MAY 8: Wednesday. Another day gone. I confess I do not know why I continue this diary, except, it may be, that it serves as a reminder of the utter futility of life. There are, however, certain scarlet pages, and lavender ones also, that still have the power to titillate emotions I thought long atrophied. I wonder if anyone save I will ever read them.

Aloysia opened in her new show tonight. I have just come from the theatre. She wanted me to join the supper Stahlbaum is giving the company, but I declined with thanks— thanks that I was in a position to decline. Time was that I should have leaped at the invitation, but I no longer need to share her with others. Her part suits her― Norton has given her fully two-thirds of the lines and she trails languid sensuality across the stage to her heart's content. I noticed that she used that trick with the mouth she first developed for my benefit. It was lost on the rabble...

4

ELEVEN p.m., Thursday, May ninth, 1937.

Item: June Sims hangs on her husband's arm as they exit from the Audubon Theatre. Her eyes sparkle with happiness. She sighs tremulously. Then: "Johnny. Maybe we'd better call up and see if Junior is all right before we go eat."

Item: Anita Harrison-Smith peers over the shoulder of her black-coated dance partner with narrowed eyes. The florid-faced, heavy man in the alcove they are just passing is her husband. His companion is Rex Cranston, president of the A.P.&C.

Without hearing she knows their talk is of debentures, temporary reactions, resistance points on Cumulative Index graphs. Howard Harrison-Smith has forgotten Anita exists, will remain oblivious of her till she comes for him to take her home.

Her small red lips set in a firmer line. He has a long wait ahead of him tonight.

Item: Aloysia Morne lets her ermine cape slide into Felix Hammond's deft hands. He bends and kisses her where a shoulder no less white than the snowy fur melts into the perfect column of her neck. She turns with studied grace, and her throaty voice reproduces the deepest note of a 'cello.

"Do you know, Felix, this lovely place of yours is more home to me than my own so-grand rooms." Hammond smiles thinly, and does not answer.

Item: In the dim light of a decrepit pier jutting into the Hudson Professor Henry Lanson is more than ever like a gigantic larva as he putters about a grotesque combination of steel rods and glittering, lenticulai copper bowls out of which a brass cylinder points telescopelike at the zenith.

An arm-thick cable crawls over the pier's frayed boards, and coils over their edge to the water. Lanson turns and checks connections on another, smaller machine.

Far across the Hudson's black surface loom the Palisades. A dash of yellow luminance zigzags against their ebony curtain, a trolley climbing to where an amusement park is an arabesque of illumination against the overcast sky.

To the right the cables of George Washington Bridge dip, twin catenaries of dotted light, and rise again. A red spark and a green one are the apices of moire, chromatic ribbons rippling across the water to the pier head from the deeper shadow of an army launch.

Braced vertically, five feet behind that pierhead, is a whitewashed steel plate. This is the target for the automatic rifle that will be fired from that bobbing launch as a first trial of the Lanson Screen's efficacy.

Other tests will follow, later. But General Thompson will not yet chance firing artillery into Manhattan.

Henry Lanson calls, in his voice without resonance, "Ready, General. Ten minutes for the first try."

From across the water Thompson snaps, "Ready. Go ahead."

Lanson lumbers back to his machine, thrusts at a lever. There is no sound, no vibration. Suddenly the river, the Palisades, disappear. The amusement park is gone, the inverted necklaces of pearly light that mark the bridge cables. There is no sky. Lanson looks at his wrist watch.

"Ten minutes," he chuckles. "He couldn't get through in ten thousand years."

He is very sure of himself, this man. But perhaps there is a minute residuum of doubt in his mind. After all, he has never experimented with so vast an extension of his invention's power. He thuds to the steel target, puts one doughy paw against it, leans out to view its riverward surface. Will there be any flecks of black on it to show the impact of the bullets that are being fired at it?

Is he warned by a sound, a creak? One cannot know. At any rate he is too obese, too ponderous, to avoid catastrophe. Under his leaning weight the steel plate rips from flimsy braces. Falls.

Its edge thuds against the physicist's head, knocks him down, crushes his skull.

Professor Henry Lanson's brain, and its secrets, are a smear of dead protoplasm mixed with shattered bone and viscous blood.

5

ELEVEN-twenty-eight p.m., Thursday, May ninth, 1937.

The lights are dim in Foo Komg's pseudo-Oriental establishment. John Sims spoons sugar into a hot teapot.

"I'm going to make a lawyer out of Junior," he says slowly. "He'll go to Dartmouth for his academic course and then to Harvard. He won't have to start working right out of high school like I did."

John is reminded of the days before June belonged to him by the setting, by the dreamy light in her eyes.

"Let's walk down Broadway," he says, "when we get through here." That is what they used to do when all the glittering things in the store windows did not seem quite as unattainable as they did now.

"No, Johnny. I want to go home. I have a queer feeling there's something wrong. Mother isn't so young any more, and she's forgotten what to do if a child is croupy or anything."

"Silly. Nothing's wrong."

"Take me home, hon."

"Oh, all right." Petulantly. "It's just like you to spoil things..."

Anita Harrison-Smith slips out of the side door of the old Gellert Mansion on East Sixty-first Street. She signals a taxi.

"Pier Fifty-seven." Her violet eyes are deep, dark pools and a visible pulse throbs in her temple...

Nobody looks at the sky. Nobody ever looks at the sky in New York. Nobody knows the sky has suddenly gone black, fathomless.

6

LATER:

"Nita!"

"Ted I―"

"You did come! Here, driver, what's the fare?"

The cab circles in Fifteenth Street, vanishes eastward. Van Norden takes the woman's arm.

"Have any trouble getting away?"

"No." She is quivering. "Hurry, darling. Let's get on board before anyone sees us."

"There's some trouble. Fog or something. The pier doors are closed, but the officials say they'll be open again directly. They won't sail without us."

"Look, Ted, it is a heavy fog. Why, you can't see the river from here. Even the other end of the ship is hidden. But there isn't any haze here. Queer. The ship seems to be cut in half; it's quite distinct up to a certain point, then there just isn't anything more. It's black, not gray like fog ought to be."

"Let's go in that little lunch wagon till we can get aboard. Nobody will look for us in there."

"Let's. I'm afraid, Ted. I'm terribly afraid..."

Nobody looks at the sky except General Darius Thompson, bobbing in a little launch on the Hudson. He is staring at vacancy where New York had been a quarter hour before. Up the river the cables of the great Bridge come out of nothingness, dip, and rise to the western shore.

Toward the Bay there is nothing to show where the metropolis should be. No light, no color. Nothing. Sheer emptiness. He looks at the radiant figures on his watch once more.

"Wonder what's keeping the old fool," he growls. "He should have dissipated the screen five minutes ago."

The night is warm, but General Thompson shivers suddenly, an appalling speculation beats at his mind, but he will not acknowledge it. He dares not.

A hundred yards from Thompson, in another space, a device of steel and copper and brass stands quiescent over the unmoving body of the one man who knew its secret.

Into the dim recesses of the army pier a dull hum penetrates, the voice of a million people going about their nightly pursuits, unaware, as yet, of doom.

In his cubicle on the hundred and ninetieth floor of New York University's Physics Building, Howard Cranston watched the moving needle of his Merton Calculator with narrowed eyes. If the graph that was slowly tracing itself on the result-sheet took the expected form, a problem that had taxed the ingenuity of the world's scientists for sixty years would be solved at last.

The lanky young physicist could not know it, but the electrically operated "brain" was repeating in thirty minutes calculations it had taken Henry Lanson three years to perform, two generations before. His own contribution had been only an idea, and knowledge of the proper factors to feed into the machine.

A red line curved on the co-ordinate sheet, met a previously drawn blue one. A bell tinkled, and there was silence in the room.

Breath came from between Cranston's lips in a long sigh. Curiously, he felt no elation.

He crossed the room slowly, and looked out through the glassite-covered aperture in the south wall. Just below, elevated highways were a tangled maze in the afternoon sun, and helicopters danced like a cloud of weaving midges. But Cranston neither heard nor saw them. His gaze was fixed farther away, down there where a curious cloud humped against the horizon, a cloud that was a challenging piling of vacancy; something that existed, that occupied space, yet was nothing.

Beyond it he could see the shimmering surface of New York Bay, and rising from it a tall white shaft. At the apex of that shaft a colossal figure faced him. It was a gigantic woman of bronze, her head bowed, her hands pressed to her heavy breasts that agonized in frustration. The Universal Mother stood in eternal mourning over the visible but unseen grave of millions.

"It might be dangerous," Howard Cranston muttered. "The gases of the decomposed bodies― there was no way for them to escape. Before I start building the machine I must find out. Carl Langdon will know."

He turned away. "But first I'll draw it up. It's simple enough― will take less than a week to build."

The design that presently took pictured form under Howard Cranston's flying fingers was strangely like that which sixty years ago Henry Lanson had called his B machine. But there was a difference. This one could be used from outside the Screen.

With the aid of this, by expanding the radius to include the original barrier, it would be a simple matter to destroy the hemiobloid of impenetrable force that was a city's tomb, to release the force which Lanson had set up.

7

RAND BARRIDON'S flivver-plane settled before a graceful small structure of metal and glass. He swung his rather square body out of the fuselage, crunched up the gravel path.

The door opened, irislike, as he stepped into the beam of the photoray. Somewhere inside a deep-toned gong sounded, and tiny pattering feet made a running sound. "Daddy! Daddy's home!"

Blond ringlets were an aureole around tiny Rob's chubby face. The father bent to him, tossed him in the air, caught him dexterously. Ruth Barridon appeared, taller than her husband, her countenance a maturer, more feminine replica of the boy's. Rob was a warm bundle against her breasts as her lips met Rand's. "You're late, hon. Supper's been ready twenty minutes."

"I know. We were talking about what they found down there." He gestured vaguely to the south. "One of the fellows flew down last night. They wouldn't let him land. But he saw enough, hovering on the five thousand foot level, to keep him awake all night."

Ruth paled, shuddered. "What an awful thing it must have been. You know, nobody ever thought much about it. The cloud had been there all our lives and it really didn't seem to mean anything. But seeing all those buildings where people just like us once lived and worked, seeing those..."

"Afterward, dear." Ruth caught the signal of the man's eyes to the quietly listening child and stopped. "I'm hungry. Let's get going."

The soft glow of artificial daylight in the Barridon living room is reflected cozily from its walls of iridescent metal. Rand stretches himself, yawns. "What's on tap tonight, hon?"

"We're staying home for a change."

"I thought this was Matilda's night."

"It is. But Mrs. Carter asked me to change with her, she had something on. And I would rather stay home. There's a new play by Stancourt. I think they call it 'Alone with Love.' Fred Barrymore is taking the lead."

"That gigolo-I can't see what you women find in him!"

"Rand! That's just a pose. You know darn well you turn him on every time."

"Oh, all right. But let's get the magazine viewcast first. They always have something interesting." He crosses the room, touches an ornamental convolution on the wall. A panel slides noiselessly sideward, revealing a white screen. A switch clicks, the room dims, the screen glows with an inner light. Rand twirls a knob.

The wall-screen becomes half of an oval room, hung with gray draperies, gray-carpeted. There is a small table in the room, behind it show the legs and back of a chair. Like the furniture in the Barridons' own place, table and chair are of lacquered metal, but these are gray. The drapes part, a tall man comes through. His face is long, pinched, his blond hair bristles straight up from his scalp, and his brown eyes are grave. The impact of a strong personality reaches out from the televised image, vibrant with a stagy dominance even over the miles of space intervening between actuality and reproduction.

"Oh, it's Grant Lowndes," Ruth breathes. "I love him!"

"Shhh." Barridon is intent. "Shhh."

The Radio Commission's premier reader moves with practiced grace. An adept at building up interest in trivialities by pantomimed portentousness, Lowndes is weaving a spell about his far-flung audience that will assure him concentrated attention. As he sinks into the seat his eyes stare from the screen with hypnotic penetration. He places a book on the table before him. Its covers are of tooled leather, but there is a smudge of green mould across them concealing the design. He opens it.

The pages are yellow, frayed-edged. Faded handwriting is visible; miniscular. An old diary, perhaps, picked up from some dusty second-hand display.

"Good evening, friends." His voice is mellow, warming, vibrant with a peculiar tensity. Ruth's tiny, stifled gasp is a tribute to its art. "The manufacturers of General Flyers Helioplanes have honored me tonight with a great privilege and a sad task. I bring to you a voice from the past, a voice long silent, speech from a throat long mouldered into dust, thoughts from a brain whose very molecules are one with the snows of yesteryear. I bring to you the palpitant, living agony of the greatest catastrophe the world has ever known." His eyes drop to the volume on the lectern, and his slim, white hand presses down upon its face.

"My colleagues of the viewcast service have informed you of the rending of the veil that sixty-two years ago cut off Manhattan Island from the world. They have brought into your homes the awful vision of dead buildings; dead streets strewn with twisted skeletons. You have, I am sure, tried to picture what must have happened there in the tragic days till eternal silence fell and the entombed city had become a vast necropolis. Today, my friends, the searchers found an account of one man's experience, a painstakingly written chronicle of that time. General Flyers is sponsoring the presentation to you of this human, pitiful tale. I will quote from the diary."

8

MAY 9, Thursday: It is four in the morning. Aloysia came here with me from the theatre... I have just returned from escorting her to the place where she resides. She does not call it home― that name she reserves for these rooms. "Home, Felix," she said, "is the place where happiness dwells." I recognized that, it is a line from one of her earlier appearances. Her mind is a blotter, seizing the thoughts, the ideas, the mental images of others and becoming impregnated with them. No. Molding itself to them. Perhaps that is the secret of her arts— dramatic and amatory.

I am restless, uneasy. There is a peculiar feeling in the air, a vague sense of impending catastrophe. Even the recollection of the past few hours with her does not drive it away...

I thought music might fit my mood. But the radio is out of gear. Tonight nothing but silence. Strangely enough the police talk was roaring in. There seems to be some trouble along the waterfront...

It ought to be getting on to dawn, but it is still pitch dark outside. There isn't any breeze. The sky is absolutely black. I have never seen anything like it in New York. Clouds at night always reflect the glow of the city lights. And if there are no clouds there should be stars, a moon. Can there be a storm coming down on the big city― a tornado? That would explain the way I feel.

May 10, Friday: There has been no daylight today. The only illumination is artificial. Somehow that seems the worst of what has happened to the city. For something has happened. Manhattan is surrounded by an impenetrable barrier. Nobody, nothing can get in or out. There have been no trains at Grand Central or Penn Station, the subway is operating only within the borders of Manhattan Island.

I have been driving around with Aloysia all day. In spite of the darkness things went on very much as usual in the morning-children went to school, toilers to their work. It dawned only gradually that more than half the staffs in offices and stores had not shown up. Those who do not live in Manhattan. At noon the newspapers came out with scare headlines. Every bridge out of the city is closed off by the veil of― what can I call it? Every pier. A cover has shut down over us as if Manhattan were a platter on which a planked steak was being brought from the kitchen of the Ritz Plaza. Even the telephone and telegraph have been affected.

By three in the afternoon the whole city was in the streets. My car was forced to move at a crawl. There was no sign of fear, though. The general consensus was that the phenomenon was something thrilling, a welcome break in the humdrum of daily existence. The mayor's proclamation, in the newspapers and over the few radio stations located within the city, seemed quite superfluous. He urged the people to be calm. Whatever it was that had shut us in was only temporary, it would vanish of itself or a way would be found to get rid of it. He has appointed a committee of scientists from Columbia and the City Colleges to investigate and make plans. The best of them all, however, is unavailable. Henry Lanson. He was found crushed to death on a Hudson River pier, killed in some obscure experiment.

Aloysia left me in time for the evening performance. The theaters and movie houses are crowded-they have had the best day in their history.

At ten o'clock tonight I went to take a drink of water. None ran from the tap. I called the superintendent and he said the mains had been shut off. There was no longer any pressure. Police orders are that water is to be used only for drinking and cooking. It is being pumped from the main by fire engines stationed at the hydrants and a rationing system has been devised. I have two or three cases of Perrier-they should be sufficient for my needs till this thing is over. There is plenty of wine and Scotch, but I have no desire for alcohol.

9

MAY 11, Saturday: The darkness still continues. No milk was delivered this morning. Prices for food have begun to go up. There is very little fresh meat to be had, practically no vegetables or fruits. Evaporated milk is being sold at a dollar a can. I am afraid the children are going to suffer a great deal...

10

MAY 12, Sunday: Church was packed. There have been several riots in the poorer sections of the city. Grocery stores were raided, a warehouse gutted. The militia has been called out, and all stocks of food taken over by the authorities for rationing.

Aloysia has just appeared, bag and baggage. She says she feels safe only here. I am going out to see what is going on.

Two p.m.: There is no longer any water in the system! The lakes in Central Park are being emptied, the fluid taken to breweries and distilleries nearby, where the water is being filtered and chlorinated. The little thus obtained, and canned fruit juices, furnish the only drink for children. Adults are drinking beer and wine.

My car was stopped by a detail of national guardsmen in uniform. No gasoline engines are to be run any longer. There is no escape for the carbon monoxide fumes being generated, and they are poisoning the atmosphere. There already have been several deaths from this cause.

A fire started in an apartment house on Third Avenue. It was extinguished by chemicals. I wonder how long that will be efficacious?

I thought I was fairly well stocked up for at least a week. But with Aloysia here, her maid and my own man, my stock of food and drinkables is rapidly disappearing. For the first time I have sent Jarvis out to the food depots, with an affidavit setting forth the size of my "family," my residence, etc. I understand that each adult is being allotted one can of meat or vegetables, and one pint of water, per day.

Three p.m.: All house lights have been turned off to conserve coal. I am writing by candle. Street lighting is still maintained. There has been no gas since the Darkness fell, the plant being in Astoria. As my own kitchen has an electric range this did not impress me, but I understand those not so taken care of had been displaying remarkable ingenuity. Several families had upended electric laundry irons and used those as grills. That is ended now. However, there is so little to cook that the lack of heat hardly brings added hardship.

Jarvis has not yet returned.

Midnight: From my window I can overlook quite a large portion of the city. A vast black pall rests over us, relieved only by the network of glowing lamps outlining the streets. Even these seem to be growing dimmer.

My valet, Jarvis, is still among the missing. He has been with me for ten years. I thought him loyal, honest. He was honest with respect to money. I have trusted him with large sums and never found him faithless. But money is worth nothing today, while food...

Stress reveals the inner nature of the human animal. I met the Harrison-Smiths today, walking along Park Avenue in the foreboding restlessness that is keeping all New York on the sidewalks. The usually iron-visaged banker presented a countenance whose color matched the clammy hue of a dead fish's belly. His heavy jowls were dewlaps quivering with fear. Even while we talked his eyes clung to his wife, who was erect, a bright white flame in the Darkness. Her eyes were answering the appeal in his. She had strength enough for both, and was keeping him from collapse by sheer, silent will. The gossips, this winter, were buzzing about Anita and Ted Van Norden, the wastrel who reminds me so much of my own youth. There could not have been any truth in the rumors.

11

MAY 13, Monday: Noon, I went out at five this morning to take my place in the long line at the food station. I have just returned with my booty. One can of sardines and a six-ounce bottle of soda― to maintain three adults twenty-four hours! On my way back I saw a man, well-dressed, chasing an alley cat. He caught it, killed it with a blow of his fist, and stuffed it in a pocket.

The air is foul with stench. A white hearse passed me, being pushed by men on foot. Someone told me that Central Park is being used as a burying ground.

I stopped to watch the passing hearse near a National Guardsman, a slim young chap whose uniform did not fit him very well. He spoke to me. "That's the worst of this thing, sir, what it's doing to children." Under his helmet his eyes were pits of somber fire. "Just think of the babies without milk. The canned stuff gave out today. My own kid is sick in bed; he can't stand the junk we've been giving him. June― that's my wife― is clean frantic."

I wanted to comfort him, but what, was there to say? "How old is your youngster?" I asked.

"Junior is two. And a swell brat! You ought to hear him talk a mile a minute. He's going to be a lawyer when he grows up."

I listened to him for a while, then made some excuse and got away. I had to or he would have seen that my eyes were wet.

Later: Aloysia has slept all day. All the windows in the apartment are open, but the air is heavy, stifling. It is difficult to move, to breathe. The shell that encloses us is immense, but eventually the oxygen in the enclosed air must be used up. Then what?

Unless relief comes soon death will be beforehand, the mass death of all the teeming population of this island. One must face that. Just what form will it take? Starvation, thirst, asphyxiation? Queer. I, who have so often babbled of the futility of life, do not want to die. It is― unpleasant― to contemplate utter extinction, the absolute end of self. I wish I believed in immortality― in some sort of future life. Even to burn eternally in hell would be better than simply― to stop.

There is a red glow to the south. Is it a thinning of the Darkness?

The city seems hushed with all traffic noise stopped. But another sound has replaced it. A high-pitched murmur, not loud, but omnipresent, insistent. I have just realized what it is. Children crying. Thousands of them, hundreds of thousands, hungry children—thirsty children...

12

MAY 14, Tuesday: The clock says it is morning. It is not dark outside any more. A red light suffuses the scene, the light of the gigantic flame that has enveloped all the lower end of the Island. There is no wind. The conflagration is spreading very slowly, but it is coming inexorably. Overhead are vast rolling billows of smoke, edged with scarlet glare. Below there is a turbulent sea of human beings. The roar of the fire, pent-in and reverberant, mingles with the crash of breaking glass, the rattle of rifle shots, a growling animal-like sound that is the voice of the mob. They are engaged in a carnival of destruction, a blind, mad venting of protest against the doom that has overtaken them. I had a dog once that was run over by some fool in a truck. When I went to pick it up it snarled and sank its teeth in my hand. That is like those people down there. They do not know what has hurt them, but they must hurt someone in return.

Where they find the strength to fight I do not know. I can scarcely move. My tongue fills my mouth. It is almost impossible to breathe.

Aloysia has just called me. It was the ghost of a word, her "Felix." In a moment I shall go in to her and lie down beside her.

GRANT Lowndes looks up from the book.

"That is all," he says simply. "In an inner room of the apartment where it was found the searchers discovered two skeletons on the mouldering ruin of a bed, a man's and a woman's.

"General Flyers bids you good night. I shall be with you again at this same hour on Friday."

He turns and goes slowly out through the gray curtains. The diary remains on the little gray table. Shadows close in from the edges of the screen, concentrating light within their contracting circle. The book is the last thing visible. That, too, is gone...

There is silence in the living room for a long minute. Rand Barridon reaches to the radiovisor switch, clicks it off. The screen is blankly white in the glow of the room light.

"You know," Barridon says slowly. "The city wasn't all burned up. Guess the fire burned up all the oxygen and put itself out. That was what killed the people too."

Ruth sighs tremulously. "Rand, I was thinking about that one thing he said, about that soldier that was worried about his sick little boy. Just think if anything like that were to happen to our Rob."

"Say, I noticed that too. The fellow had a good idea. That's what we're going to make of the kid, a lawyer. Big money and not too much hard work. We'll send him to Dartmouth first, and then to Harvard. A fellow was telling me they've got the best law school in the country."

__________________________

5: Flight Of The Silver Eagle

Thrilling Wonder Stories, Apr 1937

1: The Empty Stratocar

AGAINST a sky glorious with flung streamers of scarlet and purple, New York's leaping towers and arching aerial streetways traced a prismatic arabesque epitomizing the wonder and the beauty of the Twenty-first Century. But Don Atkins, his lithe, compact body poised on big-thewed legs widespread and firmly planted, was as oblivious to that far-off glory as to the bustle of the Federal Skyport all about him.

He stood beneath the high loom of the landing trap, squinting into the west out of slitted eyes from whose corners weather wrinkles rayed threadlike, and he was conscious of only two things.

Under the yellow silk of his airman's tunic a small, hard lump was cold against his breast. It was the talisman of the Silver Eagle, the throbbing pulse in his temples reminded him, symbol of the gallant fellowship into whose fold he had been inducted at last. The secret that for months had lain prickling between him and his one close friend, Bart Thomas, was a secret no longer. Bart himself, darting from the distant Pacific, would be here in minutes now to receive from him the twisting handgrip of the order. In minutes—in seconds—now—

A siren howled across the field. A black speck notched the low sun's upper rim. "On time to the dot!" Atkins exclaimed. A white blur in the air was suddenly a silver, tear-drop shape caught in the high-reaching fingers of the landing trap's gaunt girders, a thousand feet above him. The gigantic beam surged down, pivoting on its huge hinge, perilously fast at first, then more and more slowly as its hydraulic shock-absorbers sapped the stratocar's incredible momentum.

Atkins dashed for the spot where the duraluminum-skinned, man-carrying projectile would ground to end Thomas' half-hour flight from 'Frisco Skyport.

A knot of brown-garbed mechanics clotted around the tiny car. Their wrenches clanged against the bolt-heads that had clamped tight the hatch cover against the airlessness of upper space. Twirling metal rasped against metal. The shining oval door swung back. With eager impatience Atkins shoved past the mechanics, thrust head and shoulders into the aperture.

"Happy landing, old sock," he shouted. "Welcome to—"

The greeting froze on his lips. The tiny cubicle was unoccupied; was starkly, staringly vacant. In the heatless light of the ceiling tube the teleview screen mirrored the Skyport tarmac, glimmered from the glossy leather of the cushion on which Thomas should have lain outstretched. But Thomas wasn't there—

Atkins' skin was a tight, prickling sheath for his body. The thing was grotesquely, weirdly impossible! Impossible for his chum to have got out of the stratocar unless someone had unbolted the hatch from outside. Impossible for it to have landed somewhere so that that might have been done. To have arrived on the dot of its schedule the stratocar must never have relented from the uttermost limit of its speed. Time lost in any halt could not have been made up.

Impossible for there to have been any halt; the device was propelled by the blast of an electrostatic catapult at its starting point and had no power of its own. Once stopped it could not have taken up its flight again. And it had come straight as an arrow to the landing-trap's hooks at which 'Frisco had aimed it.

A fleck of white on the cushion caught Atkins' eye. He reached in, snatched it up. It was a bit of paper, and on it—

"Mr. Atkins," a peremptory voice battered at his giddy brain, "Conceal that and bring it to me at once."

The airman thrust the scrap into his pocket, whirled. The groundmen were crowding in around him, their swarthy countenances curious, but it was evident that none of them had spoken. Then he recalled the tiny receiver clamped against the bone behind his ear, and he knew whence the summons had come.

"This device hasn't been perfected yet," the grey man in the hidden room had said, "but within the limits of the field I can speak to you through it secretly and at will." There had been a view-screen before him, too, whose cosmic-ray eye could scan anything within fifty miles.

"Close it up," Don Atkins snapped, "and say nothing to anybody." Then he was running across the long, level tarmac, was dashing up the broad steps of Flight Headquarters Building, was hurrying through the interminable maze of corridors within.

The chaos within his skull took on a pattern as the amazing revelations of his initiation came back to him. The nation dreamed itself at peace with all the world. The Asafrican Alliance, Americans fatuously thought, having driven out the white races from the continents they had so long dominated, wanted nothing but to be left alone.

THEY reckoned without the driving ambition of Hung-Chen, the new Genghis Khan, who had forged an irresistible war machine behind the inscrutable mask of the East and awaited the auspicious moment to launch it against the Occident and the Americas. If he could not be stopped, war, rapine, slaughter, must inevitably destroy the Golden Age to which civilization had at last attained.

But here was the wall-panel, in a guarded corridor, whose curious quality he had been taught less than an hour before. Atkins halted, glanced cautiously left and right. He was unobserved. He bent to get his lips close against a certain whorl in the blue tracings with which the marble was figured, whispered a password. A whirring sound, seeming to come from the very stone itself, told him that the impact of his voice had set in motion the sound-lock within. The apparently solid marble slid open and the airman went through.

The wall thudded shut behind him. In the windowless room he entered a short, grave-faced man, mouse-like in grey silk, looked up from his desk.

"Let me see what you found," he said without preamble.

Atkins fumbled in his pocket with shaking fingers, pushed the paper across the desk to the chief of the Silver Eagle. The red lines on it leered at him again, the ominous design that had pronged him with knowledge of the catastrophe that had overtaken Thomas. A deftly drawn dragon was coiled around the orb of Earth, one taloned claw sprawling triumphantly to obliterate the double triangles of the Americas.

The chief's grey face was almost expressionless as he touched the thing with a fingertip, but under his pale, inscrutable eyes little muscles twitched uncontrollably.

"The token of Hung-Chen," he said. "Like him to let us know that he's defeated our last device against his spies."

"What does it mean?" Atkins groaned, mental agony making him forget rank for the moment. "What does it mean?"

The other's tones were very calm—only the vaguest flatting betrayed the despair that must be closing in on him like a pall.

"It means that the key to the gaps in the West Coast electro-barrage is in his hands, the only thing he needed to enable him to strike. Thomas was bringing the plan to Army Headquarters, and he's got Thomas."

"But—but you said that the Silver Eagle memorizes all its messages. You said that Hung-Chen's spies had tapped every means of secret communication we've had and that's why the Sliver Eagle was organized—"

"Correct. We thought that a band of glorified couriers, shot across the continent at a speed greater than any yet known, would circumvent him. But we've failed. This lets us know that we have failed. They will get it out of Thomas—"

"No!" Atkins' fist pounded down on the desk. "Bart will never tell. He'll die before he tells."

"He won't die until they know. They'll strip his brain—" The chief broke off. "But that may take time. If we can find him before—" He ripped a long tape from a machine on his desk. A straight purple line traced on it wavered at a single point. "Look here. This deflection in the flight-graph shows that an extra amount of power was being absorbed between three minutes, twelve seconds out of 'Frisco and seven minutes, forty-six seconds after the start. I noticed it and thought that the projectile had swerved slightly from its course, was taking additional energy to straighten it out. But it occurs to me—"

"What, sir?" Atkins demanded, excitedly. "What?"

"That something may have come into the field, there between three hundred and twenty and seven hundred and seventy miles from the Pacific, on the great circle course. We might look that region over."

"I'm going, sir!"

Grey eyes stabbed keenly at the trembling airman.

"You're new, Atkins. I don't know—"

"Bart Thomas is my friend, Chief. More than a brother—"

"Very well," the grey man made his decision. "You may go. And God help you if you are caught. Listen—"

2: The Kappa-Ray

A GREEN light from Traffic Control flashed the "all clear" signal and Atkins thrust his throttle home. His gyrocopter leaped straight up from the fields, shot up through the night past the successive glows of the level markers. The red of the lumbering freighter-lane, the yellow of the local-flight zone, the cerulean blue of the five-thousand-foot level in which the great transoceanic liners plied cometlike; they surged past in his view-screen, dropped below.

Sunburst came to him from over the bulge of the rounding terrain as his 'coptor staggered logily. Its roaring vanes could no longer find any support in the near vacuum of the stratosphere. Atkins twisted the controls.

The lifting-vanes collapsed into their slotted grooves. The flyer was a sleek silver fish from whose tail the crimson flame of rocket gases fanned out. It darted westward, silent and swift as a bat out of hell.

Atkins throttled down, reluctant but obedient to the chief's instructions. He must not overtake the sun; darkness would be his best aid. Two red spots burned bright on his cheeks and secret fires flickered in his glowing eyes.

"I'm coming, old man," he muttered between his teeth. "I'm coming, Bart. Stick to it. Don't give in. Don't tell them—"

Endlessly blurred Earth streaked underneath him, endlessly the red position dot drifted with nerve-shredding slowness across the map framed at the flyer's elbow. He shut off the feed, unfolded once more the gyrovanes. He drifted down through the darkness, silent as a cloud in a foggy night and as invisible. A rugged mountainside, forest-cloaked, swam up into dim view.

Atkins checked the descent, hovered. A twist of his wrist, and the beam of his kappa-ray projector was searching the serried carpet of the trees. To the unaided eye that beam was utterly imperceptible, but on the specially treated screen at which the airman peered avidly a flickering disc cut through imaged foliage, through dark underbrush. To the kappa-ray all organic matter is transparent; only earth, stone, or metal can reflect it and become visible.

Minutes dragged. Bare ground, only bare ground, netted by branching streamlets. Then—what was that?

Atkins held the ray steady, quivering with bowstring tenseness. An irregular cube of stone showed mistily. A house! A human habitation in the wilderness! His heart bumped crazily against his ribs. But—wait a minute—it might be a Ranger station, a depot of the men who patrolled this primeval forest that was preserved as a national park. Beyond the house a metal something, huge, curiously formed, bulked vaguely.

Atkins' pulse leaped. He had found that which he sought. Thomas' captors thought themselves well hidden beneath the leafy screen. Evidently the kappa-ray was one secret that had been successfully kept from them.

Lower still Don Atkins dropped, until he was a bare hundred feet above the treetops. Too bad his search beam could not reveal human forms. He dared not send the map coördinates of this place by radio. He would be overheard, the gang would be warned and escape. But at full power it would take him seven minutes to reach 'Frisco Skyport. Then a hundred pursuit rockets would leap into the air. In minutes the mountain could be surrounded by well-armed men. He reached for the throttle.

The sea of foliage, almost black in the long evening shadows, glowed suddenly into green flame. Just above the strange building an orange pin-point leaped into existence. An inverted cone of radiance soared lightning-swift from that focal point. Instantly the 'copter was bathed in the flare. Intolerable heat struck at Atkins. The steel walls about him flamed cherry-red. He was frying in the torrid blast.

Already his senses were leaving him—with despairing instinct he thrust at the release lever of the emergency hatch beneath his seat—no time to snatch at the parachute cone. He was falling, falling—

ATKINS lifted slowly back to consciousness. His body was seared with pain. An iron band constricted his chest and his blood was salty warm on his lips. A black silence enveloped him, broken by vague rustlings and the sound of trickling water. His dazed eyes adjusted themselves to the dimness, and he saw twisted tree branches, moonlight sifting through leaves all about him. He was lying across a sturdy, gnarled bough. Above him he could make out broken branches, a funneled path torn through thick interlacing foliage.

Slowly it dawned on him what occurred. Plunging down, he had struck the lofty crown of some forest giant. The smaller branches, the massed verdure at the top of the tree, had absorbed the force of his fall. This larger branch had caught and held him, had kept him from crashing through to the ground.

He had failed miserably. The realization wrenched a groan from him. Suddenly he tensed, clinging tightly to his bough, listening acutely. A voice sounded. Heavy bodies threshed through the underbrush. A yellow glow flickered among the trees below, and was gone. It came again, held steady as it grew brighter. Two bulking shadows appeared, forcing through the thick growth. The dim back-throw of a lantern beat against the dull green of a Ranger's uniform, familiar to Atkins from hunting and fishing expeditions in these very woods.

This was luck! Their post could not be far off, with its radio-phone. He'd chance a coded message to the chief. His throat tightened to a cautious call—

The lantern-bearer stumbled, ripped out an oath. It was not in English! His light found his face. High cheekbones, thick lips, narrow, slanted eyes. They were Orientals! They were searching for something!

Of course—it was he for whom they were looking—his body. They wanted to make sure of his death, make sure that his crumpled form, lying perhaps near a trail, would not betray their hiding place.

The lantern glow flashed dartingly along the ground, into the treetops. Atkins tried to make himself a part of the limb. Rough bark rasped a deep wound in his palm. He flinched uncontrollably, lost his grip. He was slipping, was falling ... A desperate tightening of his gripping knees, a flexing of his aching arm muscles, stopped the disastrous fall. But the leaves still rustled with his movements.

A sharp challenge ripped the forest silence. A tube in the yellow hand of one of the searchers spurted blue flame. It shot through the leaves and its heat, the acrid smoke of seared greenery, stung Atkins' nostrils. A second bolt came still nearer. Even if they missed him the light of those ray-tube flashes must reveal him to the hunters.

"Cut it out, Mingai," the other Asiatic's voice rasped in English. "It's nothing but a wildcat, or some other animal."

"I do not think so. I do not like that we have not found the body of the flyer."

"Forget it. He was burned up in the ray."

"The orange ray does not slay. It merely accelerates the electronic vibration of metallic atoms until the melting point is reached. But I forget, you would not understand. You are as stupid about scientific matters as the Americans among whom you have been raised. You even speak their barbarous tongue better than the language of your ancestors."

"You give me a pain. Come on, let's get back. We'll tell Fu-Kong to do his own dirty work."

"Very brave, you are, when he cannot hear you," Mingai sneered. "But in his presence you cringe and are meek like the rest of us. No, friend Li-San, we do not return as yet."

"All right, if you're going to be that way. Let's look further."

"Not till I discover what there is in this tree." Hope died in Atkins' brain.

"Going to keep on raying till we're spotted by some snooping Ranger?"

"No, there is a better way." Mingai turned back to the tree. His cylinder again jetted its blue flame. It was continuous now—was boring across the trunk. Back and forth the steady yellow hand drew the disintegrating beam. The great bole quivered, started to sway. Atkins got his feet beneath him on the perch, leaped down.

His aim was true. His heavy boots struck square on Mingai's shoulder. He felt bone crack beneath the impact of his weight. Even as the man dropped the American jumped sideward, catlike, his lithe form twisting in mid-air so that he faced the other Oriental. He caught a fleeting glimpse of a startled countenance—then the saffron face was obliterated by the crashing thud of his fist. He whirled away, hurtled into the shadowed brush.

Thorned tendrils caught and tore at Atkins. A root tripped him, and he crashed headlong into a tree trunk. He thudded to the ground—lay there—his tortured lungs laboring—his outstretched hands plucking at the earthy loam.

From behind, Atkins heard a thin whistle, shrill almost above the range of human hearing. From far to his right another, responding. Evidently the men from whom he had escaped were signalling for aid. He struggled erect. He was unarmed, alone, bruised and battered, terribly fatigued. But he knew now that he could escape by working down the hill, to his left. In the other direction were desperate men, weapons at their ruthless command that could whiff him into eternity at will. He turned to the right.

3: The Pursuit Squadron

DON ATKINS crouched in the shelter of a bush. Before him the stone structure he had seen from the air loomed blackly. Over the clearing a rope network carried a camouflage of tree branches that his kappa-ray had pierced. He could hear a murmur of voices, but the sounds came from beyond or within the squat building.

On the side toward him there was silence, and nothing moved. The darkness of the wall he faced was relieved by a horizontal line, a thread of light, almost imperceptible. The American's eyes clung to it. Then he was crawling across the bare ground that lay between. Twenty feet of shelterless surface, flecked with the revealing light of the moon. Could he make it, unobserved?

Inch by crawling inch, every muscle, every nerve, taut with expectation of a sudden hail, of a blue flash that would sear him into nothingness, Atkins slid toward the beckoning line of light. After an eternity, he was in the solid shadow of the wall. He raised himself cautiously and found the place where the light shone through. It was the lower edge of a steel-shuttered window, just at the level of his eyes.

He could not see much of the room within, the aperture was a mere slit. But what he saw was enough! Just within range of his vision was a table-top, black, and glistening like glass. Fastened to its surface, leather straps cutting deep into the flesh of his arms and legs, was Thomas! His friend's stocky body was stark naked. In a cold lurid light that beat down, Atkins could see his knotted muscles writhe snakelike, the sweat of agony gleaming on his skin.

Thomas' face was deathly white, his clenched teeth were revealed by lips that curved away, his eyes were closed and his cheek muscles were quivering. His forehead, his hair, were covered by a metal helmet, from which wires curled away out of sight.

A low, mechanical hum rose steadily in pitch. Bart Thomas' form arched slowly up from the table, straining against its creaking bonds. Suddenly the hum stopped, and the twisted body slumped flaccidly, inertly, down. A yellow hand, slim, its long fingers ending in pointed nails, came into view, holding a small sponge to Thomas' nostrils. The prisoner quivered, his eyes opened, and Atkins' fists clenched as he read the despair that stared from them.

He heard a voice, suavely cruel.

"It is very painful, this searching of your brain. If you chose to talk you would save yourself much anguish."

Atkins' scalp was a tight cap for his skull as the bound man's eyelids dropped, and lifted again. Even speech seemed too great an effort for him, but his lips moved. A hand was clamped over Atkins' mouth, a powerful arm wound around him from behind, pinning his own arms to his sides. He was lifted from the ground. He drove a desperate heel backward into a hard shin. Something crashed against the back of his head and he hung, dazed and barely conscious, in huge arms that carried his hundred and fifty pounds as though he were a child.

The room whirled dizzily about Don Atkins. He saw men, a television screen, a black tube that rose through the ceiling from some unknown device. He was carried through another door and a saffron-hued face, lengthened by a wisp of grey beard and drooping mustachios under a hawk nose, drifted hazily before him. Only the eyes were clear; black eyes, piercing behind their slanted lids.

Atkins was set down in a chair. Hands fumbled at him, passed a rope around him, binding him to his seat. He scarcely noted it, spellbound by those glittering eyes. His fogged brain cleared a bit and he saw a tall Oriental, imperturbable. There were banked tubes glowing behind him, and bright copper coils. To one side, a table, its black top glistening like glass. Thomas, strapped down, was looking at him with eyes in which incredulity and horror flared.

The tall Oriental spoke.

"Who is this, Na-Garri?"

FROM behind Don a huge black came in view. Dressed, like the others of the gang, in the olive-green of the Rangers, he was still redolent of the jungle. His skin was a deep, dull black that swallowed light. His bullet head sat queerly on wide shoulders from which arms thick as saplings hung loosely almost to his knees. His voice was a throaty rumble.

"I don't know, Lord Fu-Kong. But the electric-eye alarm he flash, and I find this one peeking in. So I bring him to you. Maybe he the one who we bring down from the plane, the one who jump on Mingai and Li-San."

The other nodded.

"Probably. He seems very persistent." To Atkins: "You display a great deal of interest in our proceedings. I hope you are satisfied with your present opportunity to observe them."

He reached out a clawlike hand and ripped away the front of the airman's shirt. He snatched at the token hanging there. The fine gold chain snapped, and he had it in his hand. A faint smile crossed the jaundiced mask of his face and he held the tiny bird out to the black. Not a half inch long it was, but exquisitely wrought. An eagle, poised as if in flight, it seemed almost alive.

"See, Na-Garri, this is another of the brood. They wear talismen about their necks, like your own tribesmen, to bring them good luck. But I fear the Dragon of Hung-Chen is too strong for their puny godlet." He turned back to the American. "I shall deal with you in a moment, when I have finished with your comrade. Watch closely, American, and I wish you joy of what you see."

Now he was talking to Thomas, and his voice was a crawling threat.

"Have you decided to answer my questions?"

"No!" Thomas' voice was a tortured whisper, but his lips closed tight and firm. Fear and despair drew haggard lines across his face.

Fu-Kong shrugged, stepped to the wall where a tall slate panel glittered with switch-points, gages, gleaming ebony wheels.

"Still stubborn. You will not believe me, then, that this searcher will delve deeper and deeper into the core of your brain till it wrenches the uttermost secrets of your ego from you. Yet it was an American who first proved that thought is an electric process, who first measured the tiny currents that flow along the nerves. Well, if you must have it—" His fingers closed on a lever just above binding posts to which the wires trailing from the helmet on Thomas' head trailed. "Now—"

"Fu-Kong. Fu-Kong," a shrill cry from the outer room stopped him. "Another plane has appeared above." Atkins forced his head around. Mingai was in the doorway, his shoulder bandaged, his right arm in a sling.

"Well, why burst in on me like this?" Fu-Kong was imperturbable. "Send someone to dispose of the remains."

The other's face was a sickly green. "But it got away," he gasped.

"It got away?" The phrase was like the purr of an enraged cat.

"Yes. My broken arm—I had to use my left—I missed with the orange ray, and before I could aim again he was out of range." Mingai's voice trailed away in an apologetic murmur.

"You—" the other began, fury breaking through the stony mask of his face. But again there was an interruption. A sallow Hindu appeared.

"Master, the plane that escaped is signalling to 'Frisco Skyport, and their rocket squadron is taking off."

The chief had not failed them! He had sent a following plane that by great good luck had escaped the Asiatics' lethal ray. Atkins calculated hastily. In ten minutes now this nest would be surrounded, the spies captured, Thomas freed and his secret safe.

BUT Fu-Kong was snapping peremptory orders. Mingai and the Hindu had disappeared, Na-Garri was unstrapping Thomas, was carrying him out. The Oriental leader himself, ray-tube in hand, was unfastening the rope that bound Atkins.

"Get up and precede me." The spy gestured with his weapon. The American obeyed, staggering on limbs that were needling with returning blood. He was through the outer room, his captor close behind him; was in the open. Straight ahead loomed a monstrous metal shape. Egg-shaped it was, save for one end that was sliced off sharply, and there was an opening, man-high, in its side. Na-Garri was just vanishing within, with his burden. Atkins followed. Fu-Kong clanged shut the slide behind him.

A steel ladder mounted through a dim green light, curving over an inner shell. Atkins' head came through a trapdoor above, and he was in a low, long chamber. Then he was once more tightly bound. A rough shove from the black sent him sliding across the floor to thud against Thomas' trussed and naked form.

Li-San was just closing the trapdoor. Mingai, fear in his eyes, was thrusting up on a valve-handle that projected from a large vertical pipe in the wall. At the far end, before a large view-screen, the Hindu was seated, black discs of phone receivers clamped to his ears. Beside him Fu-Kong bent over a serried row of gages and levers atop a metal console. A large view-screen before him showed the forest-bordered clearing and the stone building that had been vacated in such haste.

Fu-Kong pushed at a lever, and the view-screen was a flare of flame. It cleared. Where the house had been was a gaping hole in the ground. The Oriental's hand moved again. The screen was a down-rushing blur. It cleared once more. Velvet-black, star-strewn, the night sky was about them, and the far-below forest was a dark, mysterious sea.

"Don, old man," the whispering voice in his ear was Thomas', "how on earth did you ever get into this mess?"

"I came to find you," Atkins said grimly. "And I did. How are you?"

"Pretty rocky. But I'll keep until Fu-Kong gets a chance to work on me again."

"I can't understand how he ever got hold of you. Your carrier came in right to the dot. What happened?"

"I was zipping along, watching the U. S. shoot past in the screen, when suddenly something flashed over me and dropped down in front."

"Shot over you! I thought the rocket-stratocars were the fastest things ever produced."

"So did I, until I saw this craft. I'll bet it can make three hundred miles a minute. It passed me as if I were standing still. At any rate, there it was, right ahead of me, and slowing. The blunt end was toward me, and I thought sure I was going to crash into it. No way to swerve those carriers, you know. But just as I reached it, a hole opened and I sailed right inside."

"Good Lord! Then it's a—"

"A sort of flying trap. Damned ingenious, eh? I can figure out the rest of it now. You say the stratocar reached New York on time? That means they closed the stern and speeded up again till they were making just the rate I was. Afterward they went faster once more, got clear of my boat and dropped away. They had just picked me out of it on the fly.

"All I knew at the time was that my hatch opened, and the big black was pointing a ray-gun at me. He told me to get out, and I got. We were in an air-lock, and there was a rope ladder hanging down. I climbed it and found myself in this room. Fu-Kong was here, and the Hindu. Then in a little while we were down in the clearing, where the others were waiting. After that my troubles really began—Look at the screen!" he said sharply.

Atkins twisted himself back to his original position. In the distance a score of scarlet lights made a dancing crescent on the view-screen. They rose and fell, but came on steadily. He thrilled at the sight. These were the army flyers from 'Frisco Skyport. No mistaking that formation.

Those far-spreading wings would sweep around as the center checked, and the Asafrican craft would be caught in an enfilading fire. Fu-Kong and his gang were doomed! Peculiar how calmly they were taking it. Eastern fatalism, he supposed.

Eastern fatalism, hell! Memory fanged him! Thomas had just told of the incredible speed at Fu-Kong's command. The spy master was not trapped, far from it. He could get away at will. Why was he hanging here motionless, watching those oncoming flyers, a sardonic smile tingeing his yellow face?

Nearer and nearer the lights came. The dim shapes of the army rocket-planes showed, phantomlike. The central ship dipped, minutely, and the long line began to expand. The motley crew of the spy ship clustered behind their leader in the bow.

"Near enough." Fu-Kong's voice rang like a sentence of doom. A long pencil of orange light shot out from his vessel, wavered, impinged on the nearest plane. The flyer flared red, then dazzling white, at the tip of the beam. Then—there was nothing there. The death ray moved on to the next in line.

All along that far-flung line a coruscation of green swept, as the indomitable fighters shot out their futile answer. Lethal enough, those rays, but their range was far short. Another plane was caught in the orange beam and vanished! Another! But the squadron came on, their mile-long fire-tails lashing them through the night.

If one, only one, could get near enough to spear the Asafrican craft with its beam! Taking that one desperate chance the birdmen rushed into the face of destruction, never faltering, never wavering, as ship by ship the orange scythe reaped its deadly harvest. Only ten ships were left of the score that had first appeared, only nine—and still the green rays were miles short of their mark.

Minutes passed that were long as eternity. Eight of the intrepid attackers remained, then seven. But now the stabbing darts of emerald death were almost reaching their mark. A little more—only a little more. Suddenly the floor vibrated and Atkins heard the muted thunder of the craft's rocket blasts. The spy ship was moving at last.

Fu-Kong would escape—that was unavoidable. The terrific speed of his strange vessel could never be matched by the combination plane-and-rocket-craft of the Americans. But at least the pitiful handful remaining would escape the holocaust. Seeing the futility of their courageous attempt they would return to their base, perhaps effectuate plans for a countrywide encircling movement that might in the long run bring the yellow ship down. No—Atkins' mouth twisted in a soundless oath—the Oriental had no intention of permitting that.

The distance between the spy-craft and the nearest attacker did not increase. The Asiatic was keeping just beyond the range of the green rays—was taking toll on the American aviators with false hope while the merciless orange beam flared out, mowing the velvet night with destruction.

4: The Dragon Of Hung-Chen

OUT of the twenty flyers who had soared to the attack a bare six still charged on. They were insane! They couldn't win—

But couldn't they? Atkins stifled a gasp, was taut with sudden hope. Five of the squadron's remnant had startlingly changed their tactics. They were zigzagging, were darting left and right, up and down, in what seemed a last panicky attempt to evade the Asiatic's ray.

Senseless, it seemed—but there was one ship that had left the group. Its green ray was doused, only the pin-point red of its tail-flame betrayed its course to Atkins. He flung out his soul in a wordless prayer that neither Fu-Kong nor his aides would notice that stealthy climb.

Steadily the squadron leader mounted till the scarlet dot that marked him out was touching the upper margin of the view-screen. Ten thousand feet below, his comrades flitted about in their macabre dance, cheating the orange death again and again by breathless inches. The attention of the enemy crew was concentrated on those darting shapes, on their darting, ineffective rays.

Atkins' eyes flicked back to the lone flyer. He saw the sudden crimson burst, saw the downward curve of its flaring wake as a terrific swoop began, saw the green ray dart out ahead, spearhead of the diving hawk. Down and down and down, adding the pull of Earth to his own driving blasts, the avenger plunged in one last, magnificent effort to catch the destroyer unaware; zipping faster and faster until even in that tenuous air the steel plane-body glowed dull red with the friction of its unleashed speed.

A minute's grace—sixty unobserved seconds of that lightning slant—and it would snip the yellow menace from the skies.

"Look—Fu-Kong—look!" It was Mingai who yelped the alarm. The orange ray swept up. Jammed. By luck—by the luck with which the gods award the greatly daring—the down-darting American had found the one vulnerable angle of the spy ship. Green flame licked out hungrily, but Fu-Kong's hand was light-quick in its flash to the throttle lever. His ship lurched—jerked aside in the last possible moment of safety.

The American was under, now, right under the spy-craft. But the dragon ship was driving ahead. In an eye-blink Fu-Kong would be able to bring his death ray to bear on the daring flyer! Don Atkins flung heavily across the floor by the sudden jerk, saw, not quite three feet above him, a gleaming copper handle—the valve at which Mingai had twisted just before the take-off.

Legs lashed, arms bound, sweat pouring from his lined brow, eyes bulging from their sockets, by sheer power of stomach and trunk muscles alone he swung his torso from the floor. His head came level with that handle. His teeth clamped around it. Corded sinews stood out on his neck as he drove the valve lever down. Suddenly he was snatched loose by a lurch of the craft, and his preposterously twisted body crashed down.

But that very lurch told him of success! It was the main fuel-valve! He had cut off the rocket-tube's supply! In an instant, now, the vessel would be caught in the ray-beam of the pilot below. Atkins tensed to meet the green flash that would mean oblivion for Fu-Kong and his myrmidons—and for Bart Thomas and himself.

It never came! A shrill, high-pitched oath, footsteps running toward him, pulled open his eyes. Fu-Kong was bending over him, face livid with wrath, ray-gun rising for the coup de grâce. Behind him Li-San came up, a strange glow between his slant lids. Atkins' eyes flicked past the couple. In this final moment of life he must know what had happened, why his intended sacrifice had failed.

A BLUE electric veil, shimmering and sparking in a cerulean network of tiny lightnings, curved all across the view-screen. Beyond it the misty shapes of the attacking aircraft spat their green beams. The emerald death rays spattered harmlessly on the ionic curtain, and were quenched. From within, the orange ray thrust futilely against the hollow, defensive sphere of force.

This Atkins saw in a single, flashing glance. Then he was staring up at the enraged Oriental, was waiting in a timeless void for the blue spurt that would sear thought and consciousness and life itself from his despairing brain.

"Wait, Master!" Li-San snatched at Fu-Kong's hand, swerved it aside from its aim. "Wait! That way is too easy for the pale-skinned dog. Let me and Mingai take care of him. We have a debt to pay for what he did to us in the wood!"

In the other's slitted eyes a glint of satisfaction showed.

"I had my doubts of you, Li-San. Twice you have shown deplorable softness in your tasks. This I like much better. You may have your wish. But take him below— I have much to do and do not wish to be disturbed."

Atkins' skin crawled. Death he could face calmly— but that which the fanatic gleam in Li-San's saffron mask promised made him a coward.

"Fu-Kong," he croaked, barely able to force the words through his constricted throat. "Don't give me to him! Kill me yourself. That would be clean and honest." But the Oriental was walking away.

They took him down through the trapdoor, carried him down, flung him heavily on the plates in the narrow space between the entrance hatch and the curving inner shell.

"Untie him, Mingai." There was an undercurrent of eager excitement in Li-San's tones. Even in the face of what was to come, Atkins wondered at the gratuitous cruelty of the Oriental mind. Mingai stooped to him, fumbled at his lashings. As they fell away, the American leaped up to make a fight of it. Hopeless, of course, Li-San had his ray-gun poised for action. Better to go out that way than to suffer the planned revenge of the sadistic duo. Now—

"Hands up, Mingai! Quick!" The virulent threat in Li-San's voice made the low command seem a crashing shout. Mingai straightened. His arms flew above a saffron face from which amazement and horror had stripped its habitual mask. Li-San was braced on spread feet, his ray-gun thrust before him. His countenance was alight with a strange flame, and his eyes snapped menace. "One whimper from you and I flash!"

There was an instant of stunned silence. Then Li-San spoke again.

"Here, you American! Grab those ropes. Tie him up and gag him. Quick, man!"

Dazed by the sudden turn, Atkins obeyed. What lay behind this sudden act on the Asiatic's part? Had he suffered a sudden change of heart—He recalled, in the wood, Li-San trying to argue Mingai out of his determination to search the tree in which he was hiding. He recalled Li-San's intervention with Fu-Kong a moment ago that had certainly saved his life—

His task was finished— Mingai tightly bound, and a strip from his own tunic jammed none too gently into his mouth. Before Atkins could voice his questions there was a sudden dull roar which shook the vessel.

"He's getting under way again," Li-San barked. "We've no time to lose." He plucked Mingai's ray-gun from his belt, thrust it into the American's hand. "Come on!" He was flitting silently up the ladder, Atkins, perforce, after him.

THEY were just beneath the rivet-studded trap. Li-San lifted the lid, slowly, till a narrow crack of brighter light showed along its edge. Atkins managed to crush in alongside of him on the narrow step, and together they peered through the slit.

The blue defensive sphere was gone and the attacking ships had vanished. But something else showed in the sky; a long, slim, torpedolike object that sped straight for the spy ship. From its nose a white light flickered in a rapid series of dots and dashes. Atkins felt an electric quiver of tenseness run through the yellow man against whose body his own was crushed.

A strange pattern formed itself in the American's mind as he crouched there, waiting for he knew not what. That oncoming shape had the very form of the rocket-stratocars used by the Silver Eagle. Yet this was no messenger, waylaid as Thomas had been. He had signalled to Fu-Kong. Why had the spy-craft waited here, chancing the fight with the American planes, when it might have been away and gone with only the slightest effort? What was it that glowed from Li-San's eyes, that shook him with an ague of eagerness?

Nearer came the speeding rocket, and nearer still, until it passed out of sight at the lower edge of the view-screen. The larger craft lurched, and lurched again. Fu-Kong thrust at his levers, there was a hiss of rushing air. Then a buzzer shrilled.

"He's picking up the stratocar," Li-San whispered. "Get ready."

"All right, Na-Garri," Fu-Kong called. "The air in the entrance lock is at normal pressure. Open up."

The black bent to a ring in the center of the floor, and pulled on it. A round manhole lid came away. A head appeared, and a squat, broad body followed it.

Straight black hair, tiny black eyes almost hidden by high cheekbones, broad flat nose over thick, red lips—this was a Tatar face, a throwback to the Mongol hordes that in the Thirteenth Century ruled half the then-known world by force of arms. From that stocky figure emanated an aura of power, of dominance. Unbounded ambition, lust for power, savage cruelty, were stamped on the round, flaccid countenance.

Li-San clutched Atkins' arm, his fingers sinking into the flesh.

"It's Hung-Chen! Come himself to receive Fu-Kong's reports. Tomorrow the attack." Atkins understood why the spymaster had been unable to flee. He had had to wait here for his chief—no way to change the course of the stratocar once it had started.

The huge black bowed low. The Hindu joined him in humble obeisance. The haughty Fu-Kong came away from his controls, abject servility in every line of his tall body. The Mongol spoke sharply, and there was a rapid exchange in a shrill, high-piping tongue.

"Now!" The snapped word from Li-San galvanized Atkins into action. He thrust upon the hatch, leaped. Clang! The yellow men swung to the sound of the falling trapdoor, saw two apparitions spring into view, ray-guns at the ready.

"Throw up your hands! Up with them!" Atkins' shout drove through the chamber. "Up, or we wipe you out!" Li-San's eyes were blazing pits of wrath. Na-Garri's simian arms went ceilingward, the Hindu's, Hung-Chen's. Fu-Kong ripped out a virulent, "Traitor!" at Li-San and snatched at the cylinder in his belt.

"S-s-s-s-s!" Blue lightning hissed from Atkins' weapon. A blackened corpse crumpled slowly to the floor. "Any more?" His voice was thick with fury. But the remaining three stood statuelike. "We surrender," came the voice of the captured overlord. "Don't flash."

THEIR captives tightly bound, the two— Don Atkins, the American, and Li-San, the Chinese, turned to one another. Atkins' hand went out to the other, then hesitated— drew back. Li-San straightened.

"No," he answered the question in the American's eyes, "I am not a traitor to my own people. Here," his hand tapped his own breast, "there are two loyalties—one to the race among whom I was born, among whom I have lived my life and have my friends, the other to the race of my ancestors. War between them was unthinkable to me." He glanced down at Hung-Chen, bound and glowering, looked up again, a wistful smile hovering on his saffron face. "Now there will be no war. I'm sorry I couldn't save the squadron of planes. I had to wait until he arrived, you see. And it was too dangerous before to attempt to capture the ship."

"You joined their rotten gang, risked death and worse, to defeat their plans— to save your own people, and mine, from the horrors of war!" Atkins exclaimed. "By God, Li-San, you are a man!"

Yellow hand and white met and clasped.

"Hey, you fellows," came Bart Thomas' weak voice from the floor. "When you get time you might take three or four of these ropes off me and get me something to wear. You'll get all the handshaking you want when we get back to New York."

___________________________

6: Lost In Time

Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1937

1: The Stratocar

JIM DUNNING gasped in the surge of terrific heat. A vast roaring deafened him. He leaped to the lashed wheel of the Ulysses. In a single motion he loosed the fastenings and threw all the power of his knotted muscles into a desperate twirling of the polished spokes. The deck slanted. The yawl shot about in a foaming half circle and fled like some live, terrified thing from the whirling, topless column of fire that had leaped out of the sea.

Dunning stared, over his shoulder, across the lurid waters that a moment before had been a glassy plain, silvery under the moon of a windless Pacific night. The crimson pillar soared stupendously, the speed of its whirling whipping the ocean into long, blurred spirals of fire.

The tremendous blare of sound leaped suddenly higher in pitch, became a shriek. Something sprang into view at the base of the fiery column, something huge and black and round. On the moment the sea heaved and climbed heavenward till the flame was lashing from within a huge liquid crater. The dark wall of water expanded. A towering wave rushed toward Dunning with incredible speed.

Dunning crouched over the wheel as if to add the naked force of his will to the frantic putt-putt of the Ulysses' motor. The little vessel darted away like a thoroughbred under the lash. But the towering wave caught up with her, loomed appallingly above her. A briny avalanche crashed down on the doomed craft.

Jim Dunning fought for his life in a seething welter of waters. A hatch-cover, torn from its hinges, thudded against him. With a last, instinctive effort he hauled himself across the cleated plank, clung to it desperately as consciousness left him.

A reckless bet with some of his club members had sent Jim Dunning out from 'Frisco, six weeks before, on his disastrous attempt to cross the Pacific, single-handed, in a thirty-foot, auxiliary-engined yawl. And now in the greying dawn, his still shape floated on the tiny raft amidst a mass of wreckage. About him the vast circle of the horizon enclosed a waste of heaving waters, vacant of any life. Only a light breeze ruffled the sea's surface, calm again after the sudden disturbance of the night.

Eventually his eyes opened. Hopelessly, he raised his head. A curious object that looked like a large spherical buoy, floating half submerged, met his gaze. But what was a buoy doing here, a thousand miles from the nearest land, in water a half mile deep?

Dunning kicked off his shoes and swam strongly through the cool brine. The great ball hung above him as he floated, its exterior glass-smooth. He swam slowly around it, searching for some projection that would enable him to get to its summit. Inches above the water a threadlike crack showed. It made a rectangle three feet wide by five. Was it an entrance to the interior of the ball whose floating showed it to be hollow? There was no handle, no means of opening it.

Dunning trod water and with the flat of his hand he pushed against the unyielding sector, inward, then side-ward, with no result. In sudden exasperation he drove his fist against the polished surface and yelled: "Open, damn you, open up and let a fellow in!"

AMAZINGLY, the metal moved! Dunning stared as the curved panel jogged inward for an inch, then slid smoothly aside.

"It's like the Arabian Nights," he muttered. "I yelled 'open sesame' and it opened." A prickle along his spine did deference to the uncanny happening. Then, oddly enough, he chuckled.

"That's it! An electric robot. Nothing to be scared of."

Only a week before Dunning's departure Tom Barton had demonstrated to him this latest ingenuity of the electrical wizards. It was installed in Barton's garage, a phon-electric cell so adjusted that at the coded honking of a horn it would set a motor in motion to open the doors. Barton had picked up the idea at the airport; where the same device turned on the floodlights in response to a siren signal from an approaching airplane.

"If honking horns and howling sirens can open doors, why not the human voice? Well, let's take a look at the Forty Thieves."

Gripping the opening's lower edge Dunning leaped out of the water and through the aperture. He was in a confined chamber, its walls and ceiling the vaulted curve of the sphere itself.

Sprawled across the flat floor was a girl, unmoving. Dunning caught his breath at the white beauty framed by long black hair that cascaded along her slim length.

"No!" he groaned. "She can't be dead!"

Dunning bent over the girl and lifted one limp hand, feeling for a pulse. There was a slow throb. A long whistle of relief escaped him. She was breathing, shallowly but steadily, and her dark lashes quivered a bit where they lay softly against the curve of her pale cheeks.

There was a couch just beyond the girl. He lifted her to it, laid her down. Gently he straightened her robe of some unfamiliar, shimmering material—and whirled to some inimical presence glimpsed from the corner of his eye.

He crouched, his spine tingling with ancestral fear, his brawny arms half curved, his great fists clenched. But the man did not stir. Seated at a desk-like object just beyond the opening, he stared straight before him. It was his uncanny rigidity, the fish-white pallor of his face, that were so menacing. He was dead.

Dunning moved cautiously across the floor toward the seated corpse. It toppled as he reached it, thumped soggily to the floor.

The acrid odor of burned flesh stung Dunning's nostrils.. There was a huge cavity in the cadaver's chest, its gaping surface blackened and charred by some searing flame!

Dunning swung his back to the wall, and his glance darted about the room.

The dead man and the unconscious girl were the only other occupants of the hemisphere. Had someone killed the man, struck the girl down, and escaped? But how had he managed it? There was no room for an attacker between the body and the contrivance before which it had been seated.

That strange object was of some unfamiliar, iridescent metal. It had somewhat the size and contour of an old-fashioned roll-top desk, minus the side wings. Across the center of the erect portion, where the pigeonholes should be, stretched a long panel of what appeared to be milky-white glass, divided into two portions by a vertical metal strip. Above and below, tangent to the edge of the long panel at the ends of the metal strip, were two round plates of the same clouded glass. In spaces to left and right of these disks were arrayed a number of dial-faces; gauges or indicators of some kind.

On a waist-high, flat ledge were little colored levers, projecting through slitted grooves. From the forward edge of this a metal flap dipped down some four inches. Through this metal flap a hole gaped, its curled edges melted smooth by a flame, by the flame that had killed the man at his feet!

SOMETHING hard thrust into his back.

"Don't move! Twitch a muscle and you die!"

Dunning froze rigid at the crisp command. That voice from behind, vibrant with threat, was yet unmistakably feminine.

Dunning obeyed. A vague strangeness in the words bothered him. They were oddly accented. The low-timbred, contralto voice was speaking English, but an English queerly changed, glorified in sound, lambent with indefinable majesty.

A hand passed over his body.

"You seem to be unarmed now—turn around, slowly."

The girl was standing a yard away, pointing a black tube steadily at him. Her lips were scarlet against the dead white of her skin. Her eyes were dilated. Rage—and fear—stared forth from their grey depths.

"What have you done to Ran? Why have you killed him?"

"Nothing. I—"

"You lie!" she blazed at him. "You lie! You're one of Marnota's helots— sent to murder me! But how did he dare—open assassination? There is still law in the land—in spite of him."

"I don't know what you're talking about, sister," Dunning drawled. "My yawl was wrecked last night. When I came to, I saw your— this thing, whatever it is, and swam to it. The hatchway opened, you were on the floor, dead to the world. I lifted you to the couch, looked around, and found— this. I know less than you do how Ran was killed!"

A flicker of doubt crossed the girl's face. There was an almost imperceptible relaxation of her tenseness.

"Your voice is so strange, you speak so queerly. Where do you come from? What are you?"

"I am an American."

Suspicion flared again, and hate. Dunning waited what seemed ages for a flash from the cylinder of death.

"But— somehow— you don't seem a murderer," she said. "You have not the brutish appearance of Marnota's mercenaries. There is something strange here, something I don't understand." The tube wavered, dropped a bit.

Dunning saw his chance. His hand flicked out, closed on the uncanny weapon; wrenched it away. The girl gasped. She was white, congealed flame.

"Go ahead," she whispered defiantly. "Finish your task. Press the button and kill me."

"I haven't any desire to kill you, or to harm you," Dunning chuckled. "I only want to know what this is all about. I'm Jim Dunning. What's your name?"

"I am Thalma, Thalma of the house of Adams," she proclaimed proudly.

"Sorry, Miss Adams. The name means nothing to me."

Amazement showed in her mobile features.

"You do not know me!" she exclaimed, wonderingly. "And you say you are an American?"

"I left San Francisco six weeks ago. Have you become famous since then?"

She shook her head, still bewildered. Dunning continued.

"Up to then I'm sure I knew what was going on. I read the papers. New York had just won the World Series. Franklin Roosevelt was President of the United States—"

A startled exclamation came from Thalma. Her weapon dropped from a hand flung up as if to ward off a blow.

"Roosevelt— President! Why— that's ancient history. What year was that?"

"What year? This year, of course, 1937."

"Nineteen-thirty-seven! What are you talking about? This is 2312 A.D."

2: No Way Back

JIM DUNNING was staggered. Twenty-three, twelve! She was cra— No, she wasn't. There was no madness in her wide eyes, only dawning comprehension— and fathomless terror.

"Marnota!" Thalma said fiercely. "What has he done to me?".

"What—" Dunning forced past the constriction in his own throat. "What do you mean?"

"He— Marnota— somehow he's thrown me back in time. Four hundred years back in time!"

The statement thudded against his ears, and, incredible as it was, he knew it for truth. There was something about the girl, about this queer sphere and its contents, about the very clothing of the girl and her murdered companion, that convinced him, against all reason.

"What shall I do?" Thalma's whimper was the frightened cry of a small child, alone with the dark and with blind, overwhelming fear.

Dunning took two steps to her side. His arm went around her shoulder, protectingly.

"You just trust your Uncle Jim! Everything's going to be all right, sure as God made little apples. Just sit down over here, and powder your nose, or whatever they do in your time. Then you can tell me all about it." They moved toward the couch.

But they never reached it. The globe lurched and sent them reeling dizzily to the wall. They were buried beneath a crushing weight of bitter water. They were caught in a storm. The floor careened again, and they were sliding toward the open hatchway through which the invading wave soughed out. Mountainous waves were piled high against a slanting, jagged horizon. Dunning's feet struck the sill. Braced against it, he saw the girl's white form plunge past him. He snatched at her, just managed to clutch her foot and wrest her from the grip of the out-swirling wave.

Just above him was the door-slide. He surged to his feet and thrust the panel home.

The sphere's interior was aglow with a soft light that came from everywhere and nowhere. The imprisoned remnant of the wave rushed crazily across the lurching floor. Dunning steadied himself against the wall.

From somewhere above him he heard the girl's voice, shrill through the clamor of the storm:

"Wait! I'll get us out of this in an instant."

He looked up. Thalma was pulling herself along the wall, up the steep slope. The floor's slant reversed itself, and she was flung against the desk-like object where Ran had met his death. She caught at it, swung around to its front, was leaning over the panel through which a hole had been melted as if by a flame. One arm reached forward to the levers.

"Stop!" Dunning bellowed from a suddenly dry throat. "Don't touch that thing!" He hurled himself through space, threw the girl headlong from the board. "You fool! You little fool!"

She beat at him with her puny fists as the sphere lurched again, and whirled dizzily.

"What are you doing? We must get up and out of this storm! The stratocar will be wrecked!"

Dunning thrust her away, threw himself to the floor, rolled on his back, jerked his head and shoulders within the space beneath the level desk that held the colored handles. He reached in and wrenched at something, then slid out again.

"Look at this!" he growled.

He held up a black cylinder to Thalma. It was the counterpart of that with which she had threatened him except that the trigger-button was missing, and that two fine wires dangled from the place where it had been. He struggled to his feet.

"That," he said grimly, "is what did for your friend Ran."

THALMA paled. "And would have blasted me had I touched the levers! You have saved my life. How did you know it was there?"

"Had to be. The shot that finished him must have come through that hole in the panel. I had just figured that out when you jumped me. When I looked, just now, I could see these wires didn't belong there, that they were spliced crudely. And this was exactly like your weapon."

For a moment the tempest had lulled, but now it gripped the ball again. The orb whirled, tossed insanely.

"You said something about getting us out of this." Dunning had to shout to make himself heard. "Better do it, now, if you can, or we're done for."

He braced Thalma against the board. She pushed a red-tipped lever. Dunning felt the floor thrust against his feet. The sphere steadied, and the silence was startling after the tumult. The girl returned the lever to its original position and pressed a button at the corner of the board. The milky-white panels on the upright cleared.

Dunning was gazing through what seemed like open windows at a vast panorama. In the lower disc, black clouds billowed. Mountains of vapor thrust up from the rolling mass, were illumined by the sun's brilliant rays. In the halves of the long, rectangular panel he looked far over the storm clouds, to where a green, untroubled sea rose and fell. In the left-hand section the sun itself rode dazzling in a clear sky, a sky, whose deep blue was repeated in the upper disc. Against the whiteness of a cloud to the right Dunning saw a round black blotch that he realized with a shock was the shadow of the sphere in which he rode.

"Why," he exclaimed, "those screens show everything outside— all around, above and below!"

"Of course! How else could the stratocar be navigated?" Thalma seemed astonished at his surprise. "I forget. The visoscope was invented late in the twenty-second century. You couldn't know anything about it."

Dunning looked at the girl ruefully.

"I must seem like a child to you. It's hard to recall that you are four hundred years ahead of me. Do I understand rightly, that this 'stratocar' is some kind of flyer, like our airplanes?"

"Certainly! But it is far more efficient. It can navigate the stratosphere at speeds that to you would be unthinkable. It utilizes the terrestrial lines of force and stored solar energy. The power coils are all housed in the lower half of the ball. They are tremendously complex, but the navigation is very simple. Look here!"

Thalma turned to the control board.

"Move any of these levers away from you, and the stratocar responds. Return the handle to its original position and motion in the direction indicated stops. The red lever is to ascend, the green to descend. White is straight ahead."

Her slim fingers touched each small handle lightly as she talked.

"Black is to—" Suddenly her voice dropped, her brow wrinkled puzzledly as her hand fluttered to two levers that were uncolored. "I've never seen these before. I wonder what they're for. Could they be—" Before Dunning could stop her she had pushed one.

ACROSS the visoscope a flame shot, crimson, whirling. The stratocar's interior was a timeless, spaceless place, where there was no up, no down; no sound, no sight; nothing but a vast heatless glare through which the pinpoint that was his consciousness fell endlessly, rose endlessly, and endlessly was motionless. He had no body, almost no mind.

He was an atom at the center of a tiny vortex, he was vast, gigantic as the Universe itself. Then— was it after eternities or in the next instant?— he was himself again, and the stratocar was around him, and Thalma was there at his side! The two looked dazedly at each other. The girl reeled, would have fallen if he had not caught her.

"What on earth did you do that for?" he asked excitedly.

She didn't hear him.

"That," she said slowly, "that was how I felt before, and then everything went black, and the next thing I saw you at the control board, and Ran was lying dead on the floor. I remember now, he had just said something about dipping to the thousand foot level."

"There must have been two trick connections to the descending control; one to the ray-gun, the other to one of these two levers. That's how you were thrown back to 1937 the same moment Ran was killed. But that's neither here nor there. Do you realize what you've done? You've sent us chasing, through time. God alone knows whether we've gone forward, or back, or to what age. We knew where, or rather when, we were before you did that. We might have figured out how to get you back. But now—" He threw his arms wide.

"Then— then we're lost in time!" Her eyes were big and round, her lips trembled. "We're lost in time!"

3: Murder Without A Clue

THE phrase echoed and re-echoed, beat its terrifying meaning into Jim Dunning's brain. "Lost in time!" The vast reaches of eternity seemed to stretch before him, eons upon eons through which he and the girl were doomed to flee, searching despairingly for a familiar world. In the visoscope nothing showed but a cloudless sky and a vast green sea that heaved oilily. Had the sphere and its human contents been thrown back to the very dawn of history? Or forward into the dim future of a dying world?

A choked sob broke in on Dunning's thoughts, and a little hand grasped his arm.

"What are we going to do now?"

"Look here, young lady, there's nothing to worry about," he mollified the tearful Thalma. "Why, we're making progress. We know how to navigate in time now. All we have to do is to find out what year we're in, and then— zip, presto— we'll have you back in 2312."

A voluntary smile responded to his buoyant tone.

"I never thought of that. There are two strange levers. If one sends us one way, the other will do the reverse. There must be some way of regulating the mechanism."

"Of course there is!" No use worrying her, but that was just the difficulty. How control the time-traveling mechanism while one was merely a bodiless consciousness? "First thing to do is find some land, some people, and locate ourselves in time. Do you know which of these levers to pull?"

Thalma seated herself at the control board. "Which way?"

"East. See America first!"

The girl glanced at a dial on which were the familiar compass markings, then deftly moved a lever. The sea began to glide smoothly toward the bottom of the lower view-disc.

Were it not for the evidence of the visoscope Dunning would not have realized that the stratocar was moving, so vibrationless was its progress. The girl was still pale, and her hands were quivering. He must get her mind off their present plight.

"I wish you would tell me what all this is about. Things have been happening so quickly around here that there hasn't been any time to ask questions. For instance, who is this Mar-nota?"

"Marnota is America's greatest scientist, since, my father's death. He is my uncle and my guardian. He and father, together, invented these stratocars and countless other things that have revolutionized civilization. Through their inventions they gained tremendous power. A quarter of the population of the United States is employed by Adams, Inc. Its factories, its transportation lines, its ports and its warehouses blanket the Americas. The prosperity, the very existence of the smallest village in the country depends on the company.

"Why do you think he would wish to harm you?"

"I know he would. Although my father and Marnota were brothers, they differed widely in everything but their scientific genius. My father envisaged his work as something that would make the world a paradise, reduce the hours of labor, increase everyone's opportunity for luxury and culture. He wished to donate everything to the government, to reserve a mere livelihood for himself. But all their inventions were owned jointly by the brothers and Marnota would not permit this to be done. Money is his god.

"While father lived simply, and devoted his great wealth to the people's welfare, Marnota built himself great palaces, filled them with sycophantic degenerates who pandered to his vices. He came to my father repeatedly with urgings to reduce wages, lengthen hours, increase prices. Adams, Inc. was all-powerful, he argued. The people might grumble, but would have to submit."

THALMA paused for a moment. "When I was just fifteen, after a particularly virulent argument in which my father made it clear once for all that he would never agree to Marnota's schemes, he was killed by an explosion in the laboratory. Strangely enough, Marnota, who had been working with him on some new problem, had been called away not fifteen minutes before the fatal accident. The laboratory was completely demolished. There was no way of telling just what had happened."

"Sounds suspicious, as you tell it. But, after all, Marnota was your father's brother. Do you really believe that he—"

"I'd believe any villainy of Marnota," the girl flared. "He is vile, I tell you, vile!" Thalma was somehow less lovely as hate darkened her clean-cut features. There was a long pause, while her unfocused eyes stared into vacancy. The stratocar swam steadily eastward. No hint of what age they were in showed in the visoscope.

The girl resumed her story.

"My father's will had been made shortly after my birth, before my uncle's real character had showed itself. Imagine my horror when it was revealed that Marnota was to be my guardian, trustee of my inheritance till I was twenty-one! A week before my twenty-first birthday he presented this stratocar to me. A much improved model, he said. It could be easily handled by one person and he wanted me to have the first one produced as a birthday gift.

"I was pleased, but not for the reason he thought. With this new flyer at my disposal I could disappear, hide myself somewhere until I came into my own. For I was uneasy, frightened. My death would mean so much to him. His power over Adams, Inc. would become absolute if I were removed. That night I stole out to the car, planning to flee alone. How well Marnota read me! But Ran, my faithful servant and friend, suspected my intention, and intercepted me. He insisted on going with me, and I yielded.

"We made for Hawaii. We were above the Pacific when I heard Ran say something about descending a bit. He moved the lever. There was a sudden, awful flare into nothingness—I felt myself thrown from the couch—and—well, you know the rest."

"That flame I saw, and the wave that wrecked the Ulysses, must have been the visible result of the warping of space-time as the stratocar shot back for centuries! What a devil that uncle of yours must be, and how well he planned! A murder without a clue—the body hidden in another era. But see how the man's scheme had been upset by accidents he could not have foreseen! If you had been at the controls, instead of Ran; if you had been over land; if I hadn't happened to be at that point in all the miles of the Pacific; he would be in undisputed control of the company, with nothing to fear. As it is—"

"As it is, I can't see what difference all that makes." Thalma's tone was flat, hopeless. "I might as well be dead as wandering aimlessly—lost in time."

Once more that phrase struck a chill through Dunning. In the visoscope, low on the horizon ahead, a bluish haze appeared. The blueness deepened, solidified. A dark fleck appeared in the sky. It grew rapidly: It was a tiny ball—the sun caught it and it glinted coppery.

"Jim! Jim!" The girl's fingers dug into his arm, her voice was strident, hysterical. "It's a stratocar! A stratocar! Do you hear me? What does that mean?"

"It must mean that by some miracle we're back in your time."

"Oh, thank; God! Thank God!"

"What's that blue band around the center of that flyer, and those black discs? There are nothing like those on this sphere."

Thalma wheeled back to the screen. An exclamation of dismay came from her.

"It's a patrol ship, one of Marnota's police craft!"

FROM one of the black spots that had caught Dunning's eye a white beam shot out. It caught the time-traveler. The scene in the visoscope dissolved into a dazzling radiance.

Thalma tugged frantically at the levers. There was no response.

"They've got us in the neutralizing beam. Our power is gone!"

A voice sounded in the chamber, coldly challenging.

"What craft is that?"

The girl faced a circular device, covered with a fine metallic mesh, that was inserted in the wall beside the control board. "This is Thalma of the House of Adams." Her steady tones showed nothing of the fear that stared from her eyes. "Shut off your beam and permit me to proceed."

The voice laughed, sneeringly.

"The message received by Marnota of the House of Adams purporting to announce her return on the eve of her majority has been found to be a forgery. My orders are to bring any claimants, should they appear, directly to Marnota for identification." Dunning and Thalma exchanged startled glances. The plotter had provided against failure of his plan.

"I demand to be taken before the Federal Court." Thalma was defiant.. "Marnota may appear there, and deny my identity if he dare."

The voice continued; ignoring the interruption.

"You will follow me peaceably, or I shall be compelled to, ray you."

Thalma threw her arms wide, signaling their helplessness.

"We follow, helot!" she cried aloud. To Dunning she whispered: "One flash of their ray-gun and there will be nothing left of this stratocar but some dust. Marnota would like nothing better."

The view-screen cleared. Close at hand they could see the police-car, hovering. The voice came again.

"Keep within a hundred feet of us. Remember, the slightest swerve from that position and I blast." The blue-banded stratocar began to move, and with trembling fingers Thalma pressed down the levers to follow.

6: Death Behind The Arras

FASTER and faster the two spheres cleaved the air, till below there was but a tinted blur. The hazy earth dropped away, was a great bowl, then rounded again into a far-spread convexity. Dunning peered at the control board.

"Look here, Thalma. The time-lever you pressed returned automatically to neutral position. That must mean the time mechanism is set to make just that one leap of approximately four hundred years. That gives me an idea. All we have to do is press the other handle. We'll shoot back to my time—I'll see that you're taken care of there for life." His hands darted to the board.

Thalma thrust it aside.

"No!" Low-voiced as the exclamation was, inflexible determination sounded in it. "No, Jim, I cannot. I must remain in my own time. I must meet Marnota face to face and accuse him of his crimes. My father's memory cries out for vengeance, and the downtrodden people lift their hands to me in mute appeal. Something here," a white hand pressed against her heart, "tells me that he cannot triumph."

Dunning's hand dropped from the levers, and he was silent. He could not argue against the burning vision in Thalma's grey eyes, the fire in her low voice.

"But you can easily escape." The girl turned and pointed. "There, just in front of the couch, is a trapdoor to the lower hull. Hide below there, among the coils, till I am taken away. Then you can steal but, shift the time lever and go back to the twentieth century."

"No!" Dunning told her firmly. "I'm staying here—with you."

They were slowing now. Below was a far-spreading, white city. Great towers reached upward to the dropping sphere. The rooftops were landscaped gardens. Airy bridges leaped in a gossamer network across mile-deep chasms. Dunning glimpsed the Hudson, almost hidden beneath many bridges.

In the middle of a watery expanse Dunning recognized as New York's Upper Bay a circular building brooded, black, ominous. Straight down to its flat roof the sphere with the blue band drifted, and Thalma followed. The roof opened, dividing into many leaves that slid one under the other, and a round gap showed. The leading stratocar dipped within.

Guards in bright green uniforms surrounded them as they emerged from the stratocar. Two mercenaries ranged themselves on either side of Dunning and the girl, seizing their arms at the elbows. But just as they started forward a voice rang out.

"Sergeant Farston!"

The leader whirled, and saluted the communication disc. "Here, sir," he snapped.

From somewhere among the half dozen private police crowding around him Dunning heard a gasped, "Marnota, himself!"

"You will bring the prisoners to me, at once!"

"Yes, sir."

"Gosh, the chief has listened in on damn near everything the last week!" someone said, low-voiced.

Presently they were marched to Marnota through a circling corridor whose marble walls showed fine veinings of gold. Then the party was being challenged by a sentry before a doorway curtained by cloth of gold.

"Halt! Who goes there?"

"Sergeant Farston and prisoners."

"You will pass in at once, Sergeant, with the prisoners. Orders are to dismiss the rest of your men." The guard drew the curtain aside. A bronze portal behind it swung open.

Dunning had a confused sense of tapestry-hung walls in the room they entered, of a floor covered thick with glowing rugs. But a tableau at the other end of the chamber, fifty feet away, caught and held his attention as the sergeant halted him just within the closing door.

On a great carved chair of ebony in the cater of a gold dais, sat a small thin man whose black eyes gleamed piercingly out of a sharp-featured, hawk-like face. Thin lips were twisted in a cruel, sardonic smile.

Marnota's stubby hands rested on the arms of the throne-like chair, and it seemed to Dunning that the short fingers curled and uncurled like the claws of a cat toying with a helpless victim.

Thalma approached him fearlessly, her slight form straight and defiant. The girl's arm was outstretched, her hand pointed at the throned man.

"Remember, Marnota," her clear accents rang out, "in the end, you will fail, and terrible will be the price you pay."

Thalma's arm fell to her side. She swayed a bit, then drew herself again proudly upright. A rustle of sound drew Dunning's eyes away from her. He started. Behind the rich tapestries, to the left of the entrance, someone was hidden, someone in the green uniform of Marnota's helots. He saw a black death-cylinder, ominously ready.

Marnota's sadistic smile deepened. There was amusement in his silky tones.

"Splendid!" he said. "You are a marvelous actress. No wonder you were selected to come here with your absurd claim to be my niece. Unfortunately the forger who concocted the note that preceded you was not as skillful as the surgeon who remodeled your features."

He turned toward Dunning and his guard.

"Ah, Sergeant, you arrived a little more quickly than I anticipated. But I'll be through soon, very soon. You may leave your prisoner here, and go."

The sergeant saluted, turned sharply, and was gone.

"I shall be finished directly, young man. Just step to one side."

Marnota turned back to Thalma. "Yes," he purred. "You area a wonderful actress. Too bad you have allowed yourself to be duped into this imposture. However, you will not be able to deceive the court. You may go."

Thalma turned wonderingly toward the door. And suddenly Dunning understood Marnota's amazing show of leniency. The lurking mercenary was posted to flash the girl down as she passed. If there were an inquiry, the explanation would be simple. Balked in her attempted fraud, she had tried to escape, had been rayed, by an over-zealous guard. The cylinder would do its work well, there would be no chance for troublesome identification. He was the only witness. He would not be alive to testify.

Thalma came slowly across the floor, straight toward the waiting assassin. Dunning whirled. His great hands spread wide, caught the arras on either side of the form behind it. He lunged forward, tearing the fabric from its fastenings. He toppled, fell heavily, with the writhing, heaving bundle in his arms. A tearing dart of flame seared his shoulder. He located the round of a head under the cloth, and slugged at it. The wrapped, entangled figure slumped beneath him.

DUNNING leaped to his feet—glimpsed Marnota, standing on the gold dais, blue flashes crackling from his ray-gun— saw Thalma, just outside the open door, struggling in the arms of the outer guard.

Dunning was a maelstrom of lightning action, the very swiftness of his movements foiling Marnota's darts. He sprang through the opening, thrusting at the door as he went. The clang of its shutting drowned the smack of his fist as it splashed into the snarling face of the guard. The helot jarred loose from Thalma. His hand shot to the ray-gun, jerked it from his belt. Before he could use it, hard knuckles exploded again on his jutting jaw, and the mercenary crashed to the floor.

A siren moaned an alarm. Dunning twisted to Thalma. She was snatching up the guard's weapon from where it had spun as he fell. Its blue ray shot out, spattered against the edge of the bronze portal. The metal glowed red and fused where the heat vibrations impinged.

"The lock," the girl gasped. "That will hold him for a while."

The siren's wailing rose to new fury. From around the curve of the corridor shouts came and the thunder of many rushing feet.

"They're coming!" Dunning exclaimed. "We've got to get out of here!" He whirled to the right, hesitated as from that side, too, clamored an oncoming rush still hidden by the arc of the circling hall. Aside from the sealed entrance to Marnota's audience chamber, the black marble walls were without a break. "Finish!" he groaned. "We're trapped!"

"Not yet," Thalma snapped, her face white but her eyes bright and fearless. She was at the wall opposite the bronze door. Her hand reached out to it, her fingers pressed the center of an apparently aimless whorl in the gold tracery. A narrow rectangle of stone shot down into the floor, revealing a black void behind. "Quick! In here!"

Dunning was on her heels as she darted through. Some gesture of the girl's, indistinguishable in the darkness, sent the secret panel thudding back into place.

He crouched, listening. Had they been swift enough? Had the screen closed in time to conceal their retreat from Marnota's men? Or would the cracking of heated marble show that the ray-guns were at work, seeking out the fugitives?

Muffled noises, the moaning siren, guttural calls, an authoritative voice in sharp command, came through the wall. Behind him, Thalma's heavy breathing gusted and the beat of his own pulse hammered in his ears. The air was musty, stagnant. Dust, long undisturbed, choked him. Fierce agony seared his shoulder, sent tendrils of pain raying through him.

A hand tugged at Dunning.

"Come!" Thalma's voice was an almost inaudible whisper. "We've got to get out of here before Marnota frees himself and directs his stupid helots in their search."

The endless passage twisted, pitched downward, so narrow that Dunning's arms brushed the walls on either side. In the tar-barrel darkness even Thalma's white garments were invisible. Dunning clung to her icy, trembling hand, let it guide him down and down.

"This is the way I went when I thought I was escaping from Marnota, as he planned I should think. Jarcka, Ran's father, was in charge of this building's construction, shortly after my own father's death. He must have foreseen I should some day need a hiding place. By a minute adjustment of the building machines, he contrived this secret passage, with outlets in my own quarters, in the corridor from which we just came, and in the wall of the stratocar hangar. It also connects to a secret tunnel under the Bay, into the city."

"Secret! But thousands of men—"

THALMA answered swiftly. "Only Jarcka himself knows of it. He used Thorgersen's Mechanical Mole, converting earth and rocks into energy, reconverting some of it into a lining for the bore, harder and more rigid than steel. I—Oh-h!"

She broke off in a wail of terror. The tunnel had flared into a sudden luminescence. The walls glowed with a cold, infinitely menacing light.

"What is it?" Dunning gasped, leaping into new effort after the bounding girl. "What—"

"The search rays. The kappa-light that penetrates all inorganic matter. Hurry!"

Far behind ruptured marble crashed, and the confined space echoed with the awed snarling of the human hunting-hounds. The passage dropped steadily, curved dizzily, leveled out. Twisted sharply—and ended against a rust-red wall!

"Hell!" Dunning gasped. "We're cut off." The clamor of the following helots was appallingly nearer. "We're lost."

"No," Thalma cried, springing to a stance in front of the apparently impregnable barrier. "We're saved." She thrust the captured ray-gun into Dunning's hand, gestured queerly with raised arms, as if in invocation to some strange god. "It's the tunnel doorway. Eighteen inches of beryllo-steel. Once we're past it, it will defy the rays for hours."

Dunning whirled, crouched, his burning eyes on the angle that cut off view of the passage through which they had come. Pounding footfalls, shrill cries of the pursuers, made a fearful sound about him, and behind him Thalma's voice went on.

"Its lock is worked by beams of invisible, infra-red light. Only Jarcka and I know the combination." Thalma explained her fantastic actions. She was blocking off the guarding beams, one by one, with her waving arms. When she finished—

A green uniform hurtled around the corner Dunning watched, and toppled headlong to the impact of his beam. Another, and another, coming too fast to save themselves, met the same fate. The narrowness of the passage forced the pursuers into single file. The bodies of Dunning's victims jammed the way. His position was unassailable—as long as his weapon's charge lasted!

Behind him he heard a little exclamation of triumph, and the squealing of ponderous metal on metal. It told him the door was moving. His victims were piled across the corridor, a breast-high mound of contorted corpses that would hold the helots back for minutes.

"Jim!" There was sudden terror in Thalma's voice. "Jim! The portal is jammed. It will not open!"

5: The Bomb

DUNNING'S tone was calm. "Try again. It must open."

"No use. The electric eye responded to-my gestures, and the door started to move, but something is in its gears, blocking it. I can do nothing."

"Well, they'll know they've been in a scrap before they get us," he said grimly. "Hey—"

An ovoid object, black, fist-size, arced over the tangled bodies, hit the wall. Pounding footfalls sounded.

Horror struck at Dunning.

"Down, Thalma!" This thing was a bomb, an explosive grenade. He leaped to it, snatched it up, hurled it over the cadavers, far up the tunnel.

A tremendous detonation crashed about him. Consciousness left him for an instant, then flooded back. Every bone in his body ached, his head whirled, but he was alive. The glow induced by the kappa-light search beams was gone, and impenetrable darkness blanketed sight. "Thalma," Dunning shouted, "Thalma!"

"Here, Jim," a weak voice answered him. "Are you all right?"

"Fine as silk. And you, girl?" Dunning pulled himself to his feet and groped in the direction of the voice.

"I—I'm a bit dazed. But there aren't any bones broken. Will we ever get out of here?" Sudden joy replaced the doubt in her accents. "Jim! I can feel the jamb against which the door rested. It's open, Jim! The explosion must have blown it open. We can go on, now. We're safe!"

"Great!" Dunning exclaimed. "And Marnota thinks we were killed! Otherwise he'd still be using the search-rays."

"That's right. He's sure we're out of his way at last. There's a surprise coming to him. Now I wonder if I can get this barrier shut again." Dunning heard Thalma moving in the darkness. "No. The shock must have damaged the photo-electric control. We shall have to trust to the debris to hold them back. Come on. I shan't feel safe till we are well out of here."

The footing rose, abruptly. Thalma's fingers on Dunning's arm sent an electric tingle through him.

"The end of the tunnel, Jim!"

He sensed that she was standing before some unseen barrier, again was going through the fantastic gyrations that opened locks in this fantastic world of the future. Abruptly there was a vertical line of light in front of him. It grew rapidly wider, filling the tunnel end. The light blinded Dunning's eyes, so long used to darkness.

And then there were vague forms about him, many hands seizing him. Thalma screamed. Dunning grunted, jerked. He couldn't break the grips that held him. He was helpless! Caught! After all they had gone through they were caught! Marnota had outwitted them. He must have known all along of this tunnel.

"Salom!" It was Thalma's voice, strangely joyous. "Jarcka! Let him go. He's my friend. He saved me."

The hands dropped. A circle of men, stalwart, clad in flowing, pastel-hued cloaks, hemmed in the girl and himself.

EACH was armed with a ray-tube and the face of each was alight with a peculiar exaltation.

"Salom!" Thalma was speaking to one of them, tall grave-countenanced, grey-haired, the evident leader. "How did you know to come and meet me? How did you know I would be here?

"We didn't," the man replied. "We thought you lost. We were determined that Marnota should not live till tomorrow to claim your estates. We were going through the tunnel to raid his lair. To surprise and slay him."

"Thalma." Another spoke, shorter, his stern visage seamed with anxiety and grief. "Marnota broadcast a report that you had been killed in an explosion of your stratocar. Ran, too, has disappeared. Do you know anything of him?"

Thalma turned to him, and there was compassion, pity, in her eyes.

"Ran is dead, Jarcka. He gave his life for me, when Marnota attempted to murder me."

Jarcka staggered, as if a physical blow had struck him, and then was straight, stalwart as before.

"It is high time to put an end to Marnota's crimes. Let us proceed, Salom."

A sigh gusted through the group. They started toward the tunnel entrance. Thalma barred their way.

"Stop! You cannot go through. The tunnel is blocked."

"But you have come through it."

Thalma told them what had happened. When she had finished there was silence for a moment. Then Salom made a hopeless gesture.

"It was our last, desperate hope. Now America is lost indeed. Tomorrow morning Marnota will appear in court to demand immediate title to your half of the company. Under the law it must be given him and—"-Again his gesture took the place of words.

"Tomorrow! Where, Salom?"

"In the Federal Court, before judge Layton. Layton is on our side, but he is bound by the law. He will have to—"

"You forgot that I am alive. The law is on our side now."

"Marnota will defy the law. He will not retreat now. He has the power— and he will use it."

"No!" Thalma's clear voice rang out, and she was living flame in that dim chamber, her face aglow with a light that was somehow blinding. "He has the power. But we have right on our side. Salom. Jarcka. Take me to a safe hiding place. We have all night to think. To plan. We shall find a way to defeat him."

"Impossible," someone muttered. "He is too powerful."

"OYEZ, oyez, oyez. The court is open!" In ten centuries the immemorial formula had not changed. On the wall above the long, ornately carved bench still was pictured the ancient representation of the blindfolded goddess, with her balanced scales. The justice, in his high-backed chair, still wore the ancient black robes. Judge Layton was a short, slender man, stooped a little under the weight of his years and learning. His jaw was grim-set as he surveyed the scene below him.

The row upon row of chairs that filled the courtroom were occupied, every one, by hard-visaged men who wore the green of Marnota's cohorts. Each held, ready in his hand, the black cylinder of his ray-gun, and the eyes of each was fastened immovably on the countenance of his master.

Marnota sat at the counsel table, his bearing that of a monarch deigning to appear before his subjects. There was an aura of power, of dominance, about him, and in the sharp blackness of his eyes there was a glow of triumph. Overflowing the seat beside him, the flabby, bulging contours of him gross and sensual, was Rants, head of the Adams Company's legal forces.

At the other end of the long table Salom sat, his face an imperturbable mask. Save for the clerk of the court at his desk, and a single attendant policeman contrasting ludicrously with Marnota's armed display, he was alone. He seemed the leader of a forlorn hope, checking for the last of innumerable times the disposition of the enemy and his sparse preparations for battle.

He glanced at the huge, bronze entrance portal, at the small door behind the bench that led to Layton's chambers. And, finally at two screened openings in the ceiling, openings that Dunning might have identified, had he been present, as the voice outlets for the communication system of this twenty-fourth century world.

"The matter of the settlement of the estate of Thantala of the House of Adams." Judge Layton's voice was thin and quavering. "Any motions?" Ranta rose with a mock bow.

"Your Honor." His mellow accents filled the great chamber. "I appear for Marnota of the House of Adams, brother of the decedent and his sole surviving kin. We move that the title to all property of the estate be vested in us."

Salom was on his feet.

"Your Honor, I appear to oppose this motion."

"Representing whom?"

"Representing Thalma of the House of Adams, daughter of the decedent."

A little rustle passed through the great room.

"I object," Ranta thundered. "Thalma of the House of Adams is dead. No attorney can represent a dead person?"

Salom's voice remained calm and low. "I submit, your Honor, that the death of my client has not been proved before the court. The presumption is, therefore, that she continues to live. I move that the guardianship of Marnota of the House of Adams over the body and goods of my client, as set up by the decedent's will, be declared at an end, and that title to the property of the estate be vested in my client."

Ranta riposted, quickly.

"We have submitted affidavits from several persons who state definitely that a stratocar, in which Thalma of the House of Adams was known to be, was seen by them to explode in the air above the Pacific Ocean. We have the affiants in court and are ready to produce them."

JUDGE LAYTON turned again to Salom.

"That seems to settle the matter, counsellor. Do you demand that these witnesses be placed on the stand?"

"That will not be necessary, your Honor. I can prove the existence of my client to the court's satisfaction."

"I defy you to," Ranta roared. "You cannot prove what is not true!"

Salom's voice never rose.

"I can prove Thalma of the House of Adams to be alive."

The lawyer turned, and pointed to the massive entrance doors. As if his gesture were a signal, they started to swing slowly open. Eternity seemed to pass as the space between the huge bronze leaves widened. Salom's quiet words thudded into a deathly silence.

"Your Honor, Thalma of the House of Adams."

A slim figure stood in the aperture. The paleness of Thalma's set face matched her white garment. Only her eyes were alive, darkly grey, as they sought and held Marnota's gaze.

The crack of the judge's gavel cut short a rising murmur.

"The motion of Marnota of the House of Adams is denied. I grant—"

"Stop!" Marnota's cry cut short the words. He was on his feet. As if at an unvoiced command his helots had also risen. "I've had enough of this farce. What you grant or deny is no concern of mine."

"What do you mean?"

"You and your law have no power over me. My men have surrounded the White House, have invested every army barracks, every police headquarters, in the nation." He raised his right arm high above his head: "When my arm drops, the signal will be flashed, and the government whose law you administer will be at an end. From now on I am the law!"

"Marnota!" Thalma's voice rang sharply from the door. "Marnota! You will never give that signal!"

The bronze doors clanged, shutting her out. Swift action exploded in the courtroom. Salom, with agility beyond his years, lifted himself over the barrier, and leaped to the little door behind the judge's seat through which Layton, the clerk and the lone attendant had already darted. A roaring sound filled the chamber.

At first like the growling of some vast impending cataclysm, it shot higher and higher in pitch. In seconds it was a shrill scream, slashing at the nerves of the imprisoned Marnota and his helots, invading their quivering brains with needling pain. Then there was no longer any appreciable sound. But Marnota, feeling thin agony whipping through his body, knew that the vibrations still kept on, high above the upper limit of human hearing.

At the great bronze door, at the smaller exit through which Salom had escaped, frantic knots of green-clad men worked with their ray-tubes to force an escape. Some, deprived of reason by the searching torture of the unheard sound, clawed maniacally at the unyielding metal. A pandemonium of curiously muffled shouts burst out.

As the myriad cells of tortured bodies shattered into dissolution under the inexorable, destroying vibrations that unceasingly poured out of the communication discs in the ceiling, cylinders dropped from palsied hands, legs crumpled. The courtroom was a tremendous shambles of writhing, dying humanity.

THE invisible, inaudible, vibration of vengeance kept on. Marnota, still holding himself erect by the force of the tremendous, twisted will that had been his undoing; his face empurpled by the bursting capillaries of his skin, his eyes dark pools of torment; glared through a blurring haze the heaving, dying mass that had been the flower of his army. He strove to speak, but the cords of his throat refused his bidding. Slowly, with a defiance still radiant from his pain-wracked form, he slid to the floor. The arm that was to have given the signal for flashup flung out, quivering— There was not the least stirring of any form in all that crowded room.

Thalma's eyes held no jubilance, nor Dunning's as they stood in the doorway of that courtroom that was a tomb. After a while they turned silently away.

"Just what happened, Thalma? I know that you arranged with your secret adherents to have some kind of machinery connected with the communication system that led into the courtroom and turned on at your cue. But I can't understand how it could have done— that."

The girl's voice was very very weary.

"Some time in the twentieth century it was discovered that bacteria in milk could be killed by using sound waves above the upper limit of audibility. This process was extended to other foods, but when it was attempted to cure disease by the method, it was found that while the pathogenic bacteria were killed by the vibrations, the patient, also, was killed, or injured.

"What we did was simply to connect the sound-sterilization machinery of the Central Milk Plant with the communication system of the courtroom, and turn the tremendously amplified vibrations into the courtroom."

Jim Dunning was silent again for long minute.

"You're safe now, Thalma, and all the great power of the Adams Company is yours," he said finally. "You can carry out all your father's plans, unhindered, and make this country a paradise."

The girl's voice was very soft.

"If it hadn't been for you that could not have come to pass. I should still be— lost in time." Silence, again; and at last she spoke. "It's a great responsibility, Jim. Will you help me?"

In the grey eyes that looked into his Dunning read something that thrilled him. He knew that the world was theirs— for always.

_______________________________

7: The Cavern Of The Shining Pool

Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1937

Gurd Silton speeds into the cosmos to solve the riddle of a hole in space!

1: The Ether Eddy

I JERKED down the result-lever of my Merton Calculator, and the rattle of its gears was loud in the deserted reaches of Flight Control Headquarters. The flight-graph imprinted itself on the space-chart, the thin red line that would guide the newly launched Phobos on her maiden voyage to Venus. I glanced through the transparent quartz wall at her tremendous bulk, vague on the vast tarmac of New York's Spaceship Terminus in the brooding dark of 3 a.m. The graph line I had just traced jogged erratically, a million and a half miles out, detouring the Phobos' course a hundred thousand miles. That hump was why I was here, alone in the crystal hive. At midnight the message had pulsed in on the infra-red ray from the domed air-cell on the Moon where gaunt men ceaselessly scan the skies that Trade may ply unhampered between Earth and her sister planets.

In their electelscopes a far-flung shimmer had appeared across the blackness of space and they had leaped to send warning of the one unconquered menace that harried the spaceways. An ether eddy!

Sometimes I thought the old memories drowned, the thirty-year lingering agony ended, that had wiped out for me forever the thrill of space flight, the transcendant joy of leaping from this wrinkled ball of ours and hurtling, godlike, among the stars. Then that word, that damned word that had stripped the winged rocket from my tunic and made of me a half alive juggler of charts and figures, would strike my ears. The years would fade and I would be in hell again.

As now. I saw Jay again, my brother, too poignantly real across the span of three decades. I saw the wide-shouldered, thick-legged bulk of him, a strand of yellow hair straggling over his brow, his broad-planed face flushed with the excitement of his first command. I felt my hand crushed in his own as I wished him the immemorial "Happy landing."

The Luna's hatch shut him from my sight. The great craft blasted-off from Earth. Tile scene shifted. In tortured imagining I bent over an electelscope view field, pride pulsing in my veins as I watched the long, clean arc of his flight. He had learned my teaching well, the bantling. He would, push me hard for my laurels as ace of Earth's space fleet.

Then there was that black shimmer across the firmament's spangled black. The Luna plunged straight into it—and vanished!

There—where a moment ago she had been, even in her tininess, majestic as a symbol of man's conquest of unimaginable distances, unrealizable cold— there the inscrutable panoply of the stars stared horror at me and only a faint trail of rocket gas, glowing and fading in the vacancy, showed that the Luna had ever been.

In the madness that took me, I ripped the insignia of my craft from my blouse and swore that never again should I leave Earth's atmosphere. I kept that oath, but my great need drew me back to this place where the space ships, in ever increasing numbers, leaped for the stars.

Here, while I moldered in the dull routine of my clerk's job, I could watch the swaggering youngsters who wore the winged rocket and pretend to myself that perhaps the next craft to land would bring Jay back to me. Here I had grown old...

The little hairs prickled on the nape of my neck. The silence about me was eerie, the shadows played tricks on my overwrought nerves. Somehow I felt that I was not alone. And I was afraid.

A furtive sound whispered behind me. My eyes flicked the desk for a weapon, found none. I forced my swivel chair around, every nerve protesting.

A tall figure stood in the dimness near the door, black-cloaked, shapeless. Beneath its black hood was the pale oval of a face out of which eyes glittered, catlike, in some vagrant gleam. The figure was motionless, and all the more menacing because of its immobility. I thought of the lead-capsuled radium in the strongroom beyond my desk, the pellets that multiplied tenfold the power of the oxy-hydrogen mixture in the fuel tanks. Five million solar dollars would not replace them. Bait what thief would dare the photroncells' spray of death that guarded the treasure?

The intruder moved.

"Who are you?" I rasped. "What do you want?"

A voice came from the shape, a strained, hoarse voice.

"I'm looking for Captain Silton."

Unaccountably blood thumped in my ears. My collar was suddenly tight.

"I'm Silton," I grunted.

"But I mean Gurd Silton, commander of the Terra."

Long shivers ran through me, and a mad, impossible thought clamored. That voice!

"I am Gurd Silton," I croaked. "And once I commanded the Terra." I was no longer afraid. The ague that shook me was not of fear.

"You—you Gurd Silton!" The other's arm came up. Shrouded by the fabric of his cloak it pointed at me like a bat's wing. "You—impossible. You are an old man, and—"

I heaved from my chair.

"Who are you?" I said. "In God's name, who are you?"

I hurled myself across the space between, ripped the cloak away before he could stop me, jerked the hood from his head. And then I saw him—tousled yellow hair, a long strand dipping across his clear brow; frank grey eyes, small now in puzzlement; broad-planed, youthful face. I saw wide shoulders and thick legs planted in an old, familiar stance. Sound ripped from my throat. "Jay!"

He warded me off.

"I'm Jay Silton, all right. But you're white-haired, wrinkled! You're an old man. You can't be Gurd!"

A queer rage thickened my utterance.

"What did you expect? Thirty years don't leave a man's hair black."

And then it hit me! Jay wasn't changed at all. He was still, apparently, a youth of twenty!

He was staring at me with wide, incredulous eyes.

"Thirty years," he whispered. "Why, it's only a month since—"

Chaos whirled within my skull. Was I still in the delirium that had followed his vanishment, my long Calvary only a nightmare? I saw the space-chart, saw the date imprinted at its upper edge. November 16, 2048! I pointed to it.

"Look!" I said huskily.

My brother stared at the paper. A vein pulsed in his neck. He drew the back of a closed fist across his forehead and words dripped from his working mouth.

"But I swear it's not a month since we—lost our way. Why, there's still food left on the Luna and we had only a month's supply."

His hand came out in a gesture of utter bewilderment.

"Gurd! Where have all the years gone?" His voice was edged with hysteria, a long shudder ran through him: "Sanders is lost," he muttered, "and Hollivant. And there are thirty years gone from my life!"

Madness flamed in his eyes. I must ease him somehow, say anything to divert his thoughts from the horror.

"By the way, Jay, I didn't see the Luna land. Where is she?"

"Hidden in the Adirondack Pleasure Park, in a glen where nobody goes. I didn't dare land her here."

I was startled.

"Why? Of what are you afraid?" I recalled his furtive entrance, his close-swathed hood cloak and low-drawn hood.

"Afraid? I told you my mates are gone. Have you forgotten Rule Forty-nine?"

A chill ran through me. Rule Forty-nine is the most rigorously enforced of all the Space Code. In case of disaster to a vessel; her commander must be the last to seek safety. If he return minus crew or passengers the penalty is—death in the lethal chamber!

Severe this may be, but justified. Too often, in the early days, did space madness seize crew and master alike. Too often did craft land, with one, only, alive of those who had blasted-off.

It was the one solution, to place all weapons in control of the master, and hold him straitly accountable for the safety of all aboard.

"Jay!" my voice cracked. "You didn't—"

"No." There was utter truth in the grey eyes. "Of course not."

"But where are they? Are they alive?"

"That's the hell of it, Gurd. I don't know whether they are dead or alive. I don't know where they are."

If I was to help him I must get him talking sense.

"Come now, Jay," I rapped out, sternly. "You must have some idea of where in the universe you have been."

I could see that he was trying to pull himself together, trying to phrase something unphrasable. His hands fisted at his sides. Then, "Gurd! It sounds insane. But I don't think it was anywhere in the universe."

"What! You—"

Cold, rasping words, interrupted me. Toneless words from across nine hundred thousand miles of space. "Newyork, Newyork, Newyork," the speaker disc above my desk blared. "From Lunar Observatory. Ether eddy is fading. Ether eddy is fading. Corrections need not be made. From Lunar Observatory. Newyork, Newyork, Newyork..."

Jay's arms flung above his head, and he shouted incredible things.

"That's where they are! In that eddy or beyond it! That's where I came from; It's going, and my last chance is gone! My last chance to find them, to save them!"

In a flash I knew what must be done. I grabbed Jay's arm.

"Come on, quick!" Without his mates or a witness to his non-culpability for their loss, death was certain for him. "We still have time!" What happened to me did not matter. "Hurry!"

We were out of the room, were darting across the tarmac. The Phobos loomed its dark bulk over us, and, praise be, its entrance hatch was open. I plunged through, Jay after me.

"Close down," I shouted. "Close down!" The first command of a space flight. How long since I had uttered it!

2: Into A New Universe

I HURTLED up the companionway, followed by the clangor of the shutting airlock hatch. Thirty years since I had flown, yet all the old, hard won spacemanship tingled at my finger-tips as I burst into the control room and saw before me a gleaming bank of levers and fuel wheels.

Jay's staccato report met me, from the speaker disc above the gauge-board. "All tight, sir." Just as in the years when I taught him the secrets of the void.

"Make it so, mister," I acknowledged in the unforgotten jargon. "Stand by for the blast-off." Not for nothing had I conned the plans of this latest product of the spaceship engineers, assuaging nostalgia in vicarious flight. There was no lost motion now as I dived for the protective couch, snapped straps around me, and jammed down the main-feed lever. I functioned almost automatically, thrown back a third of a century to the old routine.

The surge of sudden vast power, the down-thudding of acceleration's weight, was a trip-hammer blow to my unaccustomed flesh. For an instant I knew the agonies of the damned, then merciful oblivion took me.

I do not know how long I was unconscious, nor what awesome speed the Phobos attained before the Thorson electro-spring cut off fuel flow. But when sight and thought returned, I saw in the visi-screen, the blackness of space, the wide-spread panoply of stars infinite in distance and number that I had thought never to set my eyes upon again, and the ominous shimmer of the ether eddy, straight ahead.

Terror jerked my unwilled hand to the braking valve, but it was too late. The Phobos plunged straight into the heart of the mystery from whence my brother had come.

In that instant livid fingers reached, twisting, into my brain!

The Phobos jarred. That jar seemed repeated in every atom of my being. Light poured in, a vivid, red light that paled the gleam, of our argons, a crimson light that smote all color from the cabin. I whirled to the visi-screen.

And then I was at the lever-bank, furiously, frantically active. I had seen a great orb blotting out the sky, a gigantic, scarlet sphere toward which we hurtled headlong.

The Phobos vibrated, screeched protest at the forces that tore at her.

Great, whirling, scarlet clouds became distinct, blanketing the strange world that had us in its grip. A craggy spire thrust above the vapor, spearing to impale our vessel.

The nose-tubes were on full force and they couldn't brake her! In minutes, in seconds, we should crash against the red world into infinitesimal fragments. It wasn't thought, it was sheer instinct unforgotten after thirty years that guided my flashing hands among the wheels and levers. There was no time for thought.

I swung her! I swung the Phobos half about as she hurtled to her doom, and with the maximum blast of her main tubes I diverted her into a sideward path, parallel to the rounding surface of the strange planet.

That held her! By the horns of Taurus, that held the craft in a circling orbit, made her a satellite of the cloud-shrouded crimson world!

I slumped, breathless, and stared at the five-fold visi-screen. In one division I saw the mist-clothed, encarnadined bulk of the world whose attraction had nearly done for us. To the side, and far off, an immense sun sent scarlet streamers writhing out from a scarlet, dazzling disc. In the other sectors the firmament was revealed; a black firmament, star-studded. In all that vast panoply of worlds and suns there was not one familiar constellation! They were strange, all strange.

A voice, a blessed human voice, broke the stillness.

"Glad! Are you all right?" Jay leaned against the hatch, his face ghastly in the weird red light, his pupils unnaturally enlarged, the corner of his mouth twitching.

"A little dazed, but whole. And you?"

His lips tried to twist into a smile. "I? Oh, I've been through this before."

"Then this is what we are looking for. This is where you lost Hollivant and Sanders.'"

He nodded. "If they're still alive, they're down there. We broke through, like this. Just as you just did, I swung the Luna about and forced her into a circling orbit.

"I did more. I turned my ship again, so that her stern was toward that world and tried to blast her away. But I couldn't, Gurd: The attraction was too great. We were held tight."

"But the Luna was powered to escape from Jupiter," I exclaimed, "against five times Earth's gravity!"

"It wasn't enough. We were chained here, eternally doomed. I dared not land, not knowing what lay under those clouds and not being equipped for interplanetary exploration. We circled endlessly, seeing below nothing but those rolling mists, now scarlet in the light of the crimson sun, now black as we passed over the night hemisphere. I refused to attempt a landing, hoping reasonlessly that patience would bring release.

"At length Hollivant and Sanders demanded permission to take space suits and make the attempt. I did not feel justified in refusing. I opened the air-lock for them, watched their bulky shapes spiral down, black against the red-lighted clouds, the long-darting flames of their gas-tubes streaming ahead of them to brake their descent. I saw them land on that peak we glimpsed, the only evidence that the strange planet is solid. And then—"

"What?"

"And then the Luna jarred. The crimson light was gone, and in the visi-screen I saw Orion with his sword, I saw White Rigel and topaz Betelgeuse blazing in splendor. The white blaze of our own Sun warmed me, and little Earth was a green disc calling me home."

"You had plunged through the ether eddy again!"

"I guessed that. But, Gurd. What does it all mean? What is this strange universe, and what became of the thirty years that seem to me less than a month?"

Somehow I knew the answer, must have reasoned it out subconsciously as he spoke. "Science has moved while you were gone, Jay. We know now that the ether eddy is the manifestation Of a fourth dimensional tangency between two spatial hyperspheres.* You remember your high school Einstein, don't you?"

_________________

[* The figure in four-dimensional geometry that is analogous to a sphere in three-dimensional i.e., the figure described by a sphere rotated through the fourth dimension, as a circle is rotated through the third dimension to describe a sphere.]

"Of course. I get it. Einstein said space, our space, is unbounded but finite, the three-dimensional surface of a hypersphere within which, and without, nothing exists that is in any way related to anything in our space. What's happened is that we've—"

"Broken through into another space. Another universe. And since, as you said, nothing in this space has any relation to anything in ours, their Times are different, so that it is perfectly reasonable that while you, here, were living only a month I, there, aged thirty years."

"Yes, but—" He didn't finish his sentence. At least I didn't hear him finish it. For I had kept my eyes on the electelscope viewplate as we talked, and just then, the Phobos having completed a circuit of the red planet, the black peak came into its field. And I had caught a flicker of movement on its surface.

It was an Earthman, his space suit unmistakable! He seemed to be struggling with something. A billow of cloud spurted upward and he was lost to view.

"They're alive," I blurted. "One of them is alive. We've got to go down there."

I managed it. With a gentle side discharge of the rocket flares I changed our level circling to a slow, tightening spiral. Each circuit we made through the shifting changes from black night to crimson day brought us nearer and nearer the clouds, and then after an interminable time, we were among them.

We were through them! We were over a great, almost level plain, black as the belly of Jonah's whale. We landed, gently as thistledown, right at the base of the needlelike spire that pierced the clouds.

"How's that for navigating?" I grinned. "The old boy hasn't lost his skill."

"Swell," Jay applauded. "But what's to do now? We can't climb that mountain. It must be fifty miles high."

"Into space suits," I snapped. "And the Phobos carries a small stratocar as a lifeboat. If there's any atmosphere at all, and there must be or there wouldn't be any clouds, that will take us up there quicker than we came down."

"Let's get going then. The fellows need our help, bad."

"We'll get going, but I'm afraid we're too late. Time's all mixed up, Jay, by our circling, but I figure a week at least has passed here since we saw him, although only minutes in the time of this universe elapsed while you came back to Earth and we returned."

"Never mind that. We've got to make a try."

"Okay. I'm with you," I responded. "Don't forget these trinite guns. I've got a hunch we're going to need them badly."

The buzzing hum of the stratocar's hydroxy motor battered against the side of that incredible mountain as we lifted straight up to its summit. Suddenly, just under the cloud ceiling I saw a hole in the rampart, underlined by a narrow ledge. And on that ledge—the broken off hand-claw of a space suit.

"In there! They're in there," I shouted. It was with an effort that I controlled my shaking hand sufficiently to land our little conveyance on the ledge. Bulky in our space suits, we squeezed out; stood precariously on the rock shelf.

The cave that confronted us seemed shallow, a blank wall closed it only six feet back. But a tunnel angled off to the left, so sharply that light, reflected not at all by the dull surface of black rock, did not enter it. My tentative, testing step felt a level floor in that Stygian darkness, and in the sensitive ear of my space suit I heard the scrape of Jay's feet following me.

The jointed metal of my garment made sudden, echoing clangor as I thumped into vertical stone. I froze. Surely that clumsy sound would arouse the mysterious denizens of this cave would bring them in sudden attack upon us! My hand-fork closed about my weapon's butt.

The stillness was ripped by a long wailing cry, packed with terror; a thin, hopeless, human wail that rose and fell, rose and fell, somewhere ahead it snapped short. The following, intensified silence was vibrant with horror.

I jumped forward. The ground dropped away from beneath me, and I was falling, falling—

3: The Turtle Men

THERE was sound now, sound aplenty. The crash of my own sheathed body, jerking from side to side. The crash of Jay dropping too, above me. Rattle of loosened stones, following us down. I dropped, dropped endlessly.

The sensation of falling ceased, but not the noises. I seemed to be floating free in the eyeless dark. My flung-out hand touched the side wall, was thrust away with terrific force. I knew then that I was still falling, but not at an increasing rate, as I should have if gravity alone were acting. Some intangible force was holding the speed of my descent steady, so that, with nothing by which to judge, I seemed to be at rest.

Precisely as if I were in a spaceship, zipping along at a thousand miles a minute, with, nil acceleration. But this was in the bowels of a world, not in the free leagues of space. Sooner or later we'd hit something solid.

The blackness greyed slightly. I felt myself moving upward, slowly. But so sudden a change of direction, at the speed I must have attained, should have torn me to bits. It dawned on me that my fall was merely slowing gradually. Queer! What could be causing this gentle deceleration?

In a sort of drab dusk I could now see the glass-smooth, curved walls blurring past. I twisted and saw Jay's queerly distorted form below— no, above me. It must be above. I had fallen first, and he had not passed me. Sensation was chaotic. As a space pilot I should have been familiar with apparent changes of direction, deceptively due to misinterpretation of changes in acceleration, in rate of motion, by the monitors in our nervous system. But it was so long since I had flown.

The light grew brighter. It was white light. White light! Brighter and brighter it was, dazzling after the dark. Abruptly the walls of the shaft were gone!

We had dropped through the roof of a tremendous cavern, its boundaries miles away! Below, straight below us, five hundred feet or more, a circular pool of what seemed white-hot, shining metal blazed. I glimpsed forms moving about its edges, a road bordering it, low-lying buildings. Beyond them fields, green fields. We were falling straight for that white blaze!

A hurtling form shot sideward, from above me, blue gas spitting. "Gurd. Your gas-tube! Your gas-tube, Gurd!"

Jay's howl shocked me back to thought, to action. I had clean forgotten that this was a self-propelled space suit. My hand-fork flashed to the control button. The death pool jerked away from under me. I thudded hard to the cavern floor, beside the prone figure of my brother. My head rang with the impact, my body felt a mass of bruises, but I was alive!

Jay's helmet was split across the forehead! Was he dead from the fall, or poisoned by unbreathable gases admitted through that ominous tear in his head cover? I rolled to him, peered in through his face-plate.

His eyelids flickered, opened. Color flowed back into his cheeks, and he smiled, wryly.

"I'm all right, Gurd. Just got a rotten crack on the head."

I was nauseous with relief.

"I thought you were gone."

"Not yet. I was born to be gassed out." He sniffed. "I smell flowers. What did you do, lay a wreath on me? A little previous, wasn't it?"

"Your helmet's cracked open."

"Good Lord, but this air is salubrious. Open up and get a whiff of it."

I got to my knees, rigid with dismay. Across the level, grassy meadow from the shining pool a horde of creatures were rushing toward us, things out of some fantastic dream, gigantic in size, of vivid, kaleidoscopic coloring.

As they came closer I saw that they were dome-shaped, more like turtles than any other Earth creature. But there was no shell, no tail, and their six unjointed legs were squarely beneath the ungainly bodies. From the topmost point of the hemispherical torsos, a full eight feet from the ground, sprang a series of long tentacles, thin and writhing snakily. In front, fragile-seeming, necks jutted, ending in comparatively tiny, globular heads, each featureless save for one unwinking green eye and two drooping, flapped ears.

Before I could move the turtle men closed around us in a jostling, nightmare circle, leaving an open space about twenty feet in diameter. They squashed into one another, seeming to merge in a solid wall of obscene protoplasm, so that we were the center of a serried circle of ball heads thrust out from a high barrier. From that incredible ring came a high, squeaking chorus of whimpering sound, oddly infantile.

I remained kneeling, gaping at that circled horror, could not have moved had I so willed.

The whimpering squeals grew in volume, then, ceased altogether. The ring parted, the crowding hosts behind gave way until there was an open lane, stretching back to whence they had come. From the direction of the pool, down that long passage, moving with vast dignity, a little procession came slowly toward us.

In front was a turtle man, similar to those we had already seen, save that his body was a steady blue and that in one of his tentacles there was a bundle of what seemed like long grass which he held aloft and waved slowly from side to side. Behind him, on some sort of discoid platform whose bearers were screened from us by the leader's bulk, lumped another of the creatures.

This one glowed purple, and even from a distance I could see that his legs and tentacles were rudimentary, while the sphere of his head was triple the size of the 'others'.

As they came on a wave accompanied them in the forest of uplifted tentacles. They came down in evident obeisance, then lifted again to resume their eternal weaving.

I rose and tried to assume what dignity of posture I could muster. The blue turtle man came within the cleared circle of grass land and moved to one side, turning as he did so. And I saw who it was that bore the palanquin of his master.

Their once natty uniforms hanging in torn strips, their faces smeared with dried blood and twisted in agony, their eyes great pits of suffering, the two Earthmen were bent almost double beneath the weight on their shoulders. Hal Sanders' face was seared by two livid welts from ear to chin, and on Ralph Hollivant's chest, where his tunic had been ripped away, another glowed angrily. I felt the hot blood of rage surge into my face. My fists balled within their gloved hand-forks.

The blue-hued major domo flicked out a tentacle that touched the platform, and then the ground, in an obvious signal, The Earthmen knelt, their necks cording with the effort, and struggled to put the palanquin down evenly.

One side slipped from Sanders' shoulder, thumping against the ground. The prime minister lashed a tentacle across the poor fellow's cheek! Hal's shoulders jerked and I held my breath, thinking he would spring at his tormentor. But, pitifully, his head drooped and all he did was to rub the new mark of punishment with a trembling, grimy hand.

I remembered Hal Sanders as a two-fisted, brawling chap, impatient of discipline. To see him meekly accept the lash told more eloquently than many words what he had gone through, what lay in store for us.

The enslaved men heaved painfully upright. They looked at us with lack-luster eyes, not the least ripple in their dull faces showing recognition of us, or wonder at our appearance.

"Hal! Ralph!" Jay cried. "What have these devils done to you?"

Hollivant looked at his blue master, appeared to beg voicelessly for permission to speak.

One of the turtle man's snakelike arms reached out to me, swept shuddersomely over my metal suit, then to Ralph's puffed lips.

Hollivant's voice was almost unrecognizable as human speech. "He wants you to get out of the space suits."

"Like hell we will," Jay blurted. "Let him try to take them off."

"You had better. We tried to defy them, and look at us. They're utter fiends."

Jay's gesture of negation was evidently understood by the weird creature. His tentacle touched Hollivant's lips again, then waved in an all-embracing movement.

"Evidently they don't want another scrap. We did some damage before they got us down. I'm to explain the uselessness of defying them."

"Never mind that," I broke in. "Tell us about this place. With the benefit of what you have learned we may have a chance to get you away."

"Impossible. If you have any weapons the best thing you can do is kill yourselves and us." They were licked, there was no question of that.

"Chin up, Ralph. Arch your back. That way out is always available. Meantime we'll try to make a fight of it. What happened to you?"

"We got down safely enough, landing somewhere on the slope of the mountain through the center of which the entrance to this hell shoots up. Hal took a chance on opening his faceplate, and when we discovered that the air was breathable we decided to signal to Captain Silton. We climbed the peak, keeping on our space suits.

"Just as we reached the underside of the clouds, what I thought was a snake whipped around me and coiled tight. I fought for a long time, there in the red fog, against writhing, snakelike things I could not see. The huge, soft, jellylike bulks gave no resistance as I slashed, and slashed, and slashed in a delirium of struggle. One of my hand-forks struck against rock and broke off, the other was bent and useless. I grew weary, weary, and I could fight no longer. The living ropes clamped tight around me, bound my arms, my legs.

"I was dragged into pitch darkness, and then I was drifting down, slowly down and down till I thought there was no end to descent."

"Slowly? Our acceleration was tremendous at first."

The blue turtle man squealed protest at my interjection, and waved a threatening tentacle. Hollivant winced.

"He's getting impatient. I'll have to cut it short."

"Get the salient facts over. I want to know especially how they get up and down that shaft. I've got a hunch that the solution to our problem lies there.'

"Okay. Here's the layout. The outside of this planet is uninhabitable because there are no life-giving rays in the light from its sun. But the pool in this cavern is a basin of highly radioactive liquid that gives off light with all the necessary vibrations at the violet end of the spectrum. As a result, animal and vegetable life has prospered here, their evolution culminating in these highly civilized creatures. Not only does the liquid give off light, but it is also tremendously repellent. Since it is sunk so deeply it acts only upward, more than cancelling the planet's natural gravity."

"How do they manage to control that repulsion?"

"They have a compound, a transparent, glasslike sort of stuff, that screens the pool effect. From the nearest building to the pond they swing out leaves of this material, or retract them, so as to moderate the repulsion; allowing it to act full force, or shutting it off entirely. Ordinary gravity acts through this glass, so the effect of covering the pool with it is to permit whatever is in the shaft to fall, instead of rise as it would if the pool were uncovered."

"I get it! By regulating the laminations they control the speed of ascent or descent. That is why we fell so fast at first, then had our speed gradually checked." Many things were clear to me now, and already a desperate plan was forming in back of my head.

"They go up there to obtain a certain ore needed in some of their scientific processes. One of their parties discovered and captured Hal and myself. Others must have observed your approach."

"We heard a scream of pain—"

"That was when I got this." He pointed to the scar on his chest. "The hole is a great speaking tube, carries sound perfectly. I heard what sounded like a space suit striking against rock, and tried to call a warning. But I was caught at it." Memory of pain was a dull flame in the lackluster eyes.

"You say they are civilized. The way they have acted to you doesn't sound like it."

"They've outgrown all emotion, except one, loyalty and veneration for their king. He is the be-all and end-all of their economy. At a word from him the whole nation would kill itself."

I had heard enough. "Listen, everybody," I said in a quiet tone, and set out my scheme rapidly and succinctly, gesturing meanwhile so as to indicate to the watching turtle man that although we refused to remove our suits we should go with them peaceably.

At a gesture of command, Hal and Ralph bent to take up their burden again, and Jay and I stepped forward to aid them.

4: Relativity Reversed

THE turtle king on his platform was unexpectedly light, despite his great size, and the four-of us bore him easily, as we followed his adjutant down the long passage that reopened through the compact mass of his fellows. I chuckled grimly when I saw that the path led straight to the edge of the pool.

"The palace," Hollivant whispered, "is on the other side. We will pass the structure from which the screens are swung and then swing around the pond."

Everything depended now on whether those screens were over the pool or not. We slowly neared it, and the brilliant light grew almost unbearable. It blazed through the major domo's body and made of it a huge sapphire jewel. It struck pearly iridescence from the walled bodies lining our course. There was an obscene beauty in the play of color, but my attention was focussed on the great vault of the cavern roof, and, directly over the deep-sunk shining pool, the black hole that betokened the lower end of the shaft.

The procession leader reached the edge of the lake of light, turned ponderously half left to skirt it. His bulk no longer eclipsed my view. I saw the answer to the question that pounded at my brain. Folded up against the wall of a building at our right I saw the transparent screens, towering above the low structure's roof. The pool was unobscured, was free to pour the full strength of its repulsion up through the long vertical tunnel where lay our only, way to release.

The blue turtle man was some ten feet ahead of us, the following hosts a respectful twenty behind. It was now or never.

"Ready," I called, quietly, and shifted one arm so that it curled up, over the palanquin edge, and gripped the upper surface. The burden jolted, the least bit, and I knew the others had done the same.

"Go!" my voice snapped, and I jumped straight for the center of the pool, still clinging to the turtle king's support. It came with me, as Jay and Ralph and Hal responded to my command. Straight out over that blazing pond we leaped and suddenly we were falling!

Falling! But the pool was above us, and the cavern roof beneath! The repulsion of that pond, taking the place of gravity, had reversed directions for us, and while to the astounded turtle men we were shooting upward to our own senses we were dropping as rapidly.

Straight for the black aperture we went, and a squeal of rage came from the palanquin. I looked up at a vast thicket of agitated tentacles and saw a blue mound whirl and scuttle toward the building against which the screens were folded. The prime minister, rushing to cut off the pool's power and bring us back to vengeance.

I jerked out my trinite gun, aimed carefully upward, past my feet, at the huge plates that hung down from the ground. I winged the trinite pellet with a prayer.

It struck, by the Pleiades! It struck squarely on the slowly unhinging screens, and they shattered into a million fragments!

Even above the shattering crash of that destruction I heard a vast high-pitched wail from the tossing multitudes above, and saw them rush headlong into the pool, saw them hurtle downward after us. Then we were in the obscurity of the shaft; falling, falling, falling toward the surface of the red planet.

"They'll blow up the shaft with their bombs," Sanders cried out. "That'll cut off the pool power, and we'll be trapped here in mid-earth."

"They won't do that as long as we have their king with us. I thought they might use some such means of stopping us. That's why I brought him along."

"Gurd!" Jay's voice. "We're accelerating rapidly. We'll crash at the top. Now that you've destroyed the screens there's nothing to stop us except the roof of the entrance cave."

"We'll slow up with our gas-tubes."

"Yeah? And give the turtle men a chance to catch up with us?"

"Pluto! I didn't think of that! Well, it'll be a clean death, anyway." I was licked.

But not Jay. "Try shooting at it," he yelled. "Maybe we can blow off the top of the peak.

"Good boy! Shoot!" We emptied our guns past the discoid resting place of the turtle king. Then we waited with bated breath, as we continued the headlong rise that, to us, seemed a fall. We knew the pellets we had loosed were speeding ahead of us, that they would surely strike the overhanging rock that threatened us. We knew the tremendous atomic power compact in each of the eighth-inch globules. Would it be sufficient to blast away the black peak?

Thunder rolled back upon us, deafening. We were thrown violently from side to side of the shaft as the disturbed air soughed past us, and I heard a squeal of pain from the turtle king. I tried to see past the platform edge, for some gleam of light that would tell me our attempt was successful. But the darkness was complete.

"No go, fellows. We're in for it."

"Good-by, Gurd. It was a grand fight while it lasted."

I reached out, groping, and my hand-fork met Jay's, gripped it hard.

Suddenly I was flung against the underside of the palanquin! I heard a squashing thud, a high-pitched scream, gurgling horribly into silence. I was one of a writhing mass of human arms, legs, bodies, and was joining my voice to a chorus of shouted, husky curses and objurgations. Something was around my neck, holding my head as in a vise. A heel beat a tattoo on the metal of my space suit.

"Hey, let up! Get your toe out of my eye!" That was Jay. I shook my head to clear it of the dizzy whirl that scrambled my brains, realized that we were no longer falling, that we were piled atop the bottom of the platform that had preceded us in all that long descent, that we were miraculously alive!

"What—what's happened?" someone gasped.

"That's easy!" I had figured it out. "The back-flash of the explosion of our trinite pellets against the roof slowed us up a darn sight more than we realized. And the eight-foot mass of jelly the other side of this sedan-chair did the rest. That turtle king made a swell bumper."

"Whew! Let's get out of here. That mob will be on us in a second."

"Gad! I'd forgotten them. How is it they haven't caught us already?"

_______________________

8: The Green Ray

Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1938

Under the curtain of the Aurora Borealis two men struggle for a lethal formula!

1: The Weapon

"YOU'VE been working too hard, Greg," Dean Thorkel, chief editor of New York Newscast Central said. "This Paris trip will set you on your feet."

Professor Gregory Vance stared at his friend out of glowing eyes.

"I'm not going to Paris, Dean," he said quietly. "Maybe by tomorrow I won't be able to go anywhere."

The atmosphere of the white-tiled laboratory was suddenly heatless with the chill of some brooding dread.

"Not going!" The newsman gasped. "Passing up the Einstein Award Convocation! Hell, man! When it was announced in nineteen ninety-six you told Cliff Hoskins and me you would devote your life to winning it. That's why you've been slaving here at National U. for seven years while I've been keeping an eye on seven seas and five continents, and Cliff's been risking his life in the Military Intelligence. You?"

"Risking his life." The words trickled from between the scientist's white lips. "Risking—" A sharp burr cut him off, the attention call of the wireless teleautograph in a corner of the lab. He twisted—and then his voice was a thin thread, wire-edged with terror. "There it is again!"

Thorkel leaped to the machine whose silver pencil danced eerily across white, unrolling paper. "Vance!" The salutation was abrupt. "Final warning. You speak before you reach Paris, willingly or—unwillingly."

The newsman, his massively sculptured countenance chalky, whirled to the disc of a verbal communications transmitter, but Vance's hand closed on his shoulder.

"No use, Dean," the physicist whispered. "I've tried to trace those messages before. He taps in from some unauthorized station of his own, and it can't be located."

"But—but—who?"

"Ho-Lung."

"Good Lord!" Thorkel breathed the exclamation. "He?"

Vance's thin lips quirked in a humorless smile.

"You've heard of him?"

"Who hasn't. He's the lone-wolf ace of the Asiatic Secret Service. He's got ears and eyes everywhere. He's killed more enemies of the Yellow Coalition than their armies. But no one knows who or what he is. Sometimes I think he's a myth. But you're no soldier or diplomat. What can he want of you?"

"Want of me?" Gregory Vance's slim white hands curled into curiously ineffectual looking fists. "I'll show you."

He moved to the lab table, lifted a cylindrical graduate from the stone slab of the laboratory table. From shelves on which hundreds of bottles were ranged, each labeled with a number only, he selected a half dozen vials. He carefully measured their contents into the etched glass until he had a liquid compound that was purplish and fuming. Somehow it seemed alive in the cold light of the beta-argon bulb in the ceiling.

The physicist picked up a lens-shaped but hollow crystal, dripped the solution he had concocted through a tiny opening until it filled the cavity. Then he fitted the lens he had made over the miniature bulb of an ordinary flash-light.

"Get down one of those cages with a white mouse in it, and place it on the table." Thorkel obeyed.

"Watch!" Vance aimed the flashlight at the cage, pressed the button. A green beam flashed out, uncannily bright even in the mock daylight of the windowless room. It struck the mouse. An exclamation of horror escaped from the newsman.

An instant before the tiny animal had been there, instinct with life. Now—a glittering, viscid pool of iridescent oil glittered at the bottom of the cage!

THE virescent light clicked out. Vance extracted the lens that had converted an ordinary flashlight into an instrument of annihilation, smashed the glass in the sink, watched the purple liquid disappear, fuming, down the drain.

"Imagine searchlight beams fanning that green ray through the skies and over the seas, trapping the oncoming hosts of an enemy and melting them, melting human beings into oily nothingness as that mouse was melted.

"Imagine their rocket-ships dropping uncontrolled from the heavens, their surface craft colliding, sinking into a boiling sea. What price invasion then?

"And all that is needed to make the weapon ready is the compound to fill the hollow lenses. Every glass factory in the country is now busy casting for the searchlights with which our coasts are lined, for the aircraft beacons which dot the continent.

"But—but how can mere light produce such an effect?"

"It's simple. You know that matter is the result of a disturbance in the sub-ether, just as light is a vibration of the ether. And that ether and sub-ether are intimately interconnected. I have discovered a light vibration that steps up the vibrations of material atoms one micron. It transmutes elements, in other words. It acts only on organic matter, so far—transmutes the elements of any living body to others a little higher in the scale. And that?"—Vance nodded at the oily pool that had been a living thing moments before—"Is the result of the transmutation. Now do you know why Ho-Lung has been after me for weeks?"

"For weeks!" Thorkel exclaimed in surprise. "But— your life hasn't already been attempted. Surely I should have heard."

"No," the other replied. "He wants the secret for his country. The ray is as formidable a weapon of offense as of defense. His messages have taken me up on high mountains and offered me the earth and the fullness thereof. He has resorted to threats only in the past week, as I neared perfection."

"Neared perfection! It looks pretty damn perfect to me."

"The effects, yes. But adjustments are necessary so that the target of the ray may not be shielded. My ray will penetrate any material except a certain ferro-beryllium alloy. Unfortunately, that alloy is the very one used to armor the Oriental rocket ships. I am on the track of the solution. In a few days I hope to have it. Otherwise— the thing is useless."

"But the Army laboratories! Surely they must be helping you on this. You must have given them some idea of the thing, so that they should be able to proceed if anything should happen to you."

"No. The War Department has ordered the hollow lenses purely on blind faith in me. The basic principle of the ray is known by myself alone. Our service is honeycombed with spies.

"Cliff Hoskins flew in from Manchukuo six months ago. Just a week before that I had got in touch with the War Secretary and given him in strictest confidence the barest outline of what I was working on. Three days later, Hoskins, eavesdropping on a conference of the Asiatic General Staff, had heard a full report of every detail of my talk!"

"Then if you are killed the whole thing is lost."

"Wiped out!" Vance's hand erased a chalk mark on the table-top. "Like that. If they can get the formula from me, well and good. But as soon as they are convinced that I will not yield it to them they will make sure the American Government does not get it either. That is why I cannot go to Paris, why I must hide. I have a place prepared, and I can get there unobserved. I shall show you how later. There is only one chance in a hundred of their getting me, once I'm away, but I want to guard against that one chance."

Vance pulled a paper from his pocket, handed it to Thorkel. The other saw figures at the top, map co-ordinates of some point in the Far North. Then there was a long line of curious symbols, symbols that were vaguely familiar.

"The location of my hiding place," Vance explained. "And the formula, in our old code."

Thorkel remembered. How clearly that brought back the old student days, when he, Greg, and Cliff Hoskins had been inseparable. Hoskins had been reading treatises on cryptography and had challenged the other two to devise a code he could not decipher. They had accepted, and won. Hoskins had accused them of being unfair when he learned that three keywords were necessary to the solution.

"The keywords are these." Vance wrote three words on a bit of paper, displayed them to Thorkel, then tore the scrap of paper into tiny fragments. "You know how much depends on the safety of that formula. If you don't hear from me within a week, take it to the Secretary of War—to no one else." Greg gripped Thorkel's arm, his fingers digging deep in emphasis. "Remember, Dean, give the formula to no one else, whoever he is, no matter what the circumstances."

Vance turned to the door. "Now come out to the hangar with me and I shall show you how I shall get away, literally unseen."

2: The Stolen Cipher

DEAN THORKEL strode through the high-ceilinged dispatch room of New York Newscast Central, his heels clicking sharply on the rotunda's marble floor. He was oblivious of the intermingled voices of the announcers droning to a million listeners their running commentary on the televised picturing of world events. He climbed stairs to his bright metal desk atop a raised platform at the center of the hall. Beneath his chestnut thatch his brown eyes were almost black with foreboding.

"Good morning, Mr. Thorkel."

"Morning, Haley. How'd the night go?"

"Fairly smoothly, sir." Randall Haley, night editor, was short, emaciated, completely bald. His tiny eyes, uncannily bright behind slitted, lashless lids; his sharp, hooked nose, gave him the appearance of a bird—a vulture. "The Aurora Borealis is kicking up again and Transcontinental Air's Arctic refueling fields are cut off. But nothing ever happens up there."

"All right. I'll take over." Behind his expressionless features a band seemed to constrict about Thorkel's brain. The electrical disturbance might last for days. Suppose Greg wanted to communicate with him—. He grunted vaguely. Sinking into his swivel chair, he bent as if to fasten the lace of his shoe. There was the slither of steel on steel, barely perceptible. In a moment Vance's cryptic formula was safe in a secret drawer.

Thorkel straightened, switched the foot-square monitor screen before him to the wave-length of a newscopter that hovered above the hundred-story Science Tower of National University.

On the screen's shimmering surface a tiny figure emerged from the penthouse laboratory where, to quote the Einstein Award Citation, "science has leaped forward a century in five years." It moved to a blue, toylike one-man gyrocopter that had been rolled out of its hangar.

"Professor Vance is entering his 'copter, folks," the reporter's voice droned. "In seconds he will take off—"

"Mr. Dean Thorkel, I believe," suave tones drawled from the stairhead. Thorkel twisted around.

"Cliff Hoskins, you tramp," he roared, jumping up. "Where the hell did you drop from?"

The stocky, dark man in quiet gray came across the platform.

"Hell's right," he responded, low-toned. "I tried to get here in time to slap old Greg on the back before he left for Paris, but skin-friction held my rocket plane up and I'm too late, I—"

"You're just in time," Thorkel snapped. "He's taking off. Look." He turned back to the screen.

The imaged plane blurred as its vanes gathered speed. It lifted from the roof, gained attitude in vertical ascent—and vanished!

"My God!" the reporter cried. "That wasn't a static blot, folks. Professor Vance is—gone. Blotted out, I can't see his plane anywhere."

Low words thudded from Thorkel's lips. "It works. By all that's holy, it works!"

"What works, Dean?" Hoskins questioned. "What's happened to Greg?"

"He's skipped. He's putting himself out of harm's way until he finishes his job."

"So you know about that!" Cliff Hoskins slid the seat of his trousers onto the desktop. "Where did he go?"

"Sorry, Cliff. I can't tell even you."

"But you know. It's on something hidden in your desk." The Secret Service man grinned. "It's okay with me, Dean, but you want to be more careful. You looked down just then. That was a dead give away. An Asiatic spy would not have missed it."

Thorkel, startled, swivelled about to where Haley, behind him, was washing up. The little man's face was a mass of soap suds; he could have heard, seen, nothing.

"I've got about a half hour to chin with you," Hoskins said. "Then I've got to get back to Manchukuo. Big doings there."

For thirty minutes the Intelligence man told a rapt listener of an East buzzing with activity, of new explosives by the hundred thousand tons pouring from smoking factories, of vast arrays of rocket planes and hordes of surface-craft, of all the gigantic thunderbolt Asiatica was forging to launch at America, the only nation strong enough to resist the Mongolian dream of world domination.

"I tell you, Dean, we haven't a ghost of a show unless Greg comes through. Even then—" Hoskins shrugged. "But I've got to go." He rose, then paused. "Say—I may have to get in touch with you, in a hurry. How?"

Thorkel reached for a memorandum pad, jotted some numbers on it. "Here's the wave-length combo of my private line. I've just changed it. Greg's the only other who knows it. That'll be the safest for you to use."

Hoskins took the slip, studied it briefly.

"This may be foolish, but it's a habit," he said. He grinned, crumpled the memo into a ball and popped it into his mouth. Then, with an insouciant wave of the hand, he was gone, returning with a smile on his face to the alien land where death stalked always at his elbow.

"No report on Professor Vance's whereabouts—. No trace has been found of Professor Gregory Vance." All the rest of that day, all the next morning, the recurring phrase from the busy operators pounded at Dean Thorkel, thumped into his brain. The total absence of news from Greg meant that his plan was working, that he was safe. But—

Mid-morning, a low, insistent burr pulled his eyes to the serried row of phonejacks on his desktop. A red glow showed above the furthest one on his private line. Only two men knew that combination. Greg! It must be Greg! Thorkel slammed on his headphones, jammed the dangling plug into its receptacle.

"Hello."

"Dean?" A flat voice, monotonous, unfamiliar. "Greg speaking. Greg Vance." It didn't sound like Greg. Thorkel jerked down two cupped discs from the headband across his skull, fitted them over his eyes.

"What's up?" It was Greg Vance. The visor eyepieces brought his image clearly, his high-domed head, the patch of premature gray at its temples. But—it must have been the effect of the Borealis—a greenish tinge filmed the televised face and the eyes seemed glazed, expressionless.

"Dean!" the unnatural voice whispered. "Come to me. I need—" A sudden shadow loomed behind Greg's head. It was gone. There was a thud in Thorkel's ears, the soft thud of a fallen body. Then—nothing.

Someone had found Greg! Some enemy. Thorkel ripped the headpiece away, crouched below the screen of his desk. He pulled out the lowermost drawer. His hand slid within it, pressed against the upper-edge of one side-piece, forced the apparently solid metal down and to the rear. The steel slid. Thorkel's fingers fumbled within the revealed cavity.

The concealed niche was empty. The paper that meant Vance's safety, the nation's safety, was gone.

Thorkel lunged to his feet, leaped the stairs to the floor below, ran in great, bounding strides to the exit. His 'copter was parked, sleekly yellow, in the open roof-square. In a few seconds he was in its driving seat.

Above, the traffic beam showed red, and a green police plane hovered watchfully. But Dean Thorkel thrust over the throttle, and the gyro shot up from its berth, zoomed through the thick cross-streams overhead.

Thorkel had a momentary glimpse of a white-faced pilot at the controls of a lumbering bus-flier as he shot across its prow. His stubby wings scraped a rusting flivver's wings. A woman's shrill scream came thinly up to him. The traffic cop's siren was in his ears and the green plane was diving for him.

A twisted grin relieved the grimness of Thorkel's face for an instant. His horizontal-flight propeller screamed as it bit the air. The yellow gyro darted north. The police boat banked and was after him. Dead ahead another green plane appeared, steadied, waited ominously.

On the dashboard before the newsman a foot-square metal box was fastened, crudely. Fine wires led from the box, and made a meshwork on all the outer surfaces of Thorkel's gyro.

"You may have to reach me unobserved," Greg Vance had said, when he had worked to install the queer contrivance. "This will enable you to do so, as it will enable me to slip away unseen."

The first police craft was overhauling Thorkel, was fifty yards behind. Its siren shrilled again, and a black, metallic tube snouted at him. Thorket jabbed at a button on the front of the box.

Two traffic officers rubbed amazed eyes, and looked again for the yellow gyro that had flicked into non-existence between them. But there was nothing to be seen!

Everything outside his own little ship was nothingness to Thorkel's eyes. He was in a tiny world of his own, suspended in illimitable, empty space. Only sound beat in to him from the invisible world about him, the sough of the crowded air-lanes two thousand feet below, the muted roar of the great city still lower, the rattling thunder of the pursuer's prop, the police siren moaning into sudden silence.

On the fifteen thousand foot level, where chances of collision were at a minimum, Dean Thorkel drove on northward. Blind flying with a vengeance, this was, though broad daylight and an unclouded sky were all about him. For that same daylight was flowing around his gyro, the ether waves curved by the field of force the little box produced and the fine wires guided. No sight could come to Thorkel of things beyond that network, nor could anyone beyond that network see his plane. The light waves were warped.

"Good thing," Thorkel muttered, "that I've got a sound-wave robot pilot instead of the old style radio-reflector, or I'd sure be out of luck."

Cold crept into the yellow gyro-copter's cabin, cold that even the high altitude heat-coils could not combat. The position dot on the robot-pilot's map was close to the point where it became necessary for Thorkel to take over the manual control for the landing. He pressed a black button.

An illimitable expanse of snow and ice stretched desolate beneath him. Overhead the Aurora's macabre dance of sheeted light was eerie against night's black curtain. Far to the west an air-borne dot circled, minutely scarlet. Instinct, the call of kind to kind in the vast loneliness, told Dean Thorkel that this was a plane, man-guided. It faded into the lurid dance of the Northern Lights.

The automatic control relinquished the plane's guidance. Moments later, Dean Thorkel stumbled across tumbled blocks of ice. He passed a blue plane, frost-whitened, hidden beneath the overarch of a pressure-ridge. His breath fell in snow before his mouth, and each inhalation was an agony. The snow-hill just ahead was a house. Its outlines wavered as the icy fingers of a forty-below temperature twisted his brain. The shape of a door was vague in the ice-encrusted wall.

He forced a numbed hand to it. But the door opened before he touched it. A tall figure stood in the jagged rectangle. Its long face was a white, expressionless mask. Gregory Vance lifted an arm, jerkily, beckoned Thorkel in.

"Greg!" Thorkel's intended shout was a frozen whisper. "Greg! You're all right! I thought—" Thorkel went across the threshold, reached for the statuelike figure of his friend, touched its shoulder. Suddenly Vance crumpled, to the floor, slowly, horribly, as the man-form robots used in domestic service crumple when the power-cast fails.

"Greg!" Dead eyes stared up at Thorkel. Just beneath the hairline a threadlike scar circled, crimson on the gray-white forehead. Thorkel peered closer—

"Freeze. And keep your hands away from your body!" Dean Thorkel twisted to the sharp command behind him. He saw a squat apparition, formless in a loose black robe; the head a faceless black globe, a black-gloved hand thrusting at him the blued steel of a forty-shot Trinite gun. Thorkel stiffened, his arms grotesquely out from his body.

The voice came again through the swathings, flat, colorless.

"You are Dean Thorkel." It was not a question, it was a statement.

Eyes glittered through holes in the ebon fabric. The black figure was ten feet away. It was useless to attack him. Before Thorkel could possibly close with him the tiny Trinite projectiles from his gun would tear into the American, would explode, and he would be spattered flesh.

"Yes, I'm Thorkel. What do you want?"

"The keywords of the cipher Vance left with you."

Then the formula was safe! The cipher was unreadable without the keywords. Thorkel shook his head, wordlessly.

The flat, cold voice was brittle.

"It will be better for you to give it to me willingly. I shall have it from you— be assured of that. And the process will not be— pleasant."

Torture! The Mongol's were adepts at it. But torture could not make a dead man talk! Thorkel's knees dipped, his hands fisted. He sprang— straight at the pointing gun!

Something caught his ankles, tripped him. Amazingly, Vance's body jerked toward him, headfirst across the floor! Thorkel fell.

3: Vance's Corpse

THE newsman lifted slowly back to consciousness through a weltering purple darkness that was thick about him. His head pumped pain against a thin band tight around his skull. Fingers fumbled at his brow. His eyes opened. A black-swathed head floated before them, and glittering pupils in which glinted green flecks of light peered at him. A relentless, unhuman voice beat against his dulled ears.

"What is the code?"

Thorkel's lips tasted salty blood. But he forced words through them. "No!"

The black head drifted upward as the Oriental straightened. The gun was gone from his hand, but there was something else in it, something metallic from which wires trailed. One filament came down to Thorkel's head, the other disappeared within the spy's robe.

The gloved hand twisted at that which it held. Fire bound Dean Thorkel's head in agony. Fire ran, a searing flood, through his veins. Sight, hearing, were gone. Feeling alone was left as every cell of his body quivered in anguish.

Then the fire died, and he was a limp, helpless mass on the floor.

"What is the keyword to the cipher?" Cold, pitiless, the inexorable question came down to him from the masked figure.

There was no escape, no hope of rescue. Greg Vance had chosen this location because of its isolation, its loneliness. Eventually human endurance would crumple and Thorkel would be compelled to divulge the key-words. Yet Thorkel still could say, through gritted teeth, "No, you scum," and gather himself to withstand the return of hell.

It didn't come. The spy twisted to a frost-hazed window. The stutter of a descending plane was muffled by thick walls. The masked torturer bent to his victim, twitched the wire off. An inner door closed behind his retreating form.

The front door shoved in before the rush of bulked bodies.

"What's going on in here? What's all the delay?" Two men, formless in heavy furs, were inside the room. There were Trinite guns in their mitted hands. There were red tabs on their shoulders, the badges of the Northwest Flying Police!

"He's inside," Thorkel gasped. "The killer's in there!" He poked a shaking hand at the inner door.

The Flyies whirled.

"Come on, Connors." one yelled, "McKraken's inside!" The two made a diving rush across the floor, were in the other room.

A wave of nausea rose, engulfed Dean Thorkel in a dizzy whirlpool. Air! He had to have air! He fumbled through the door, reeling. Intense cold struck at him, froze the mists from his brain. He saw a black shape flitting across the ice, saw it vanish behind a hummock. The slayer was escaping! He must—

Iron fingers gripped his arm, hauled him back into the house. A gun snouted in his face. "Not so fast, you!"

"He got out," Thorkel yammered. "He's getting away! Quick— you can still catch him!"

The Flyie's reply was heavy with sarcasm.

"Oh yeah! We'll chase shadows outside while you beat it. Say, we cops may be dumb, guy, but we don't fall for the same stunt twice. Stick 'em up!"

"Hey, Daniels!" The one called Connors was standing over Greg's body. He had a paper in his hand. "Guess who this stiff is! It's that Professor Vance—missing since Monday. This 'tele' picture's kind of blurred, but it's him all right."

Daniels swore picturesquely. "An' this is the bird that killed him. Well, Connors, that McKraken's slipped us, but we've made a damn sight better catch. Here's where we get our stripes." Steel cuffs clicked over Thorkel's wrists.

"You're making a terrible mistake," the newsman protested. "The murderer is escaping while—"

"Sure it's terrible—for you," the officer scoffed, heavily humorous. "I'll say you're running in tough luck. Here we're out hunting a mechanic from Z40 refueling field that's stabbed his boss. We see your gyro's down here, think it's the yellow boat he took to make his getaway, and come busting in—just in time to spoil your little party."

"I tell you I'm not the murderer," Thorkel pleaded. "The real killer is escaping, while you're fooling around with me. Vance got a call for help through to me—I'm chief editor of New York Newscast Central—and I reached here just too late. Vance opened the door for me. He dropped just as I got in. It was that close. The killer jumped me and—"

"That's all wet," drawled Connors, kneeling to examine the dead Vance. "This corpse is stiffer than a poker— he's been dead at least twelve hours."

Hysteria edged Thorkel's cry.

"But he talked to me not an hour ago. I saw him—"

The policeman's big hand flicked out, slapped stingingly against his mouth. "Cut the fairy tales, you." He shoved the bewildered man roughly into a chair, snapped another handcuff around one ankle and a chair-leg. "Let's take a look at the body."

Thorkel buried his face in his linked hands. An hour ago Vance had called for help on the wave-lengths. Only Vance and Cliff Hoskins knew how to compose the combination of his private line. Minutes ago Vance had welcomed him at the door of his retreat. Now he was dead and the Flying Policeman, trained to determinations of that nature, his opinion not to be disputed, had pronounced the scientist to have been lifeless for twelve hours at least!

Talk penetrated.

"Man, look at this! What the hell has this bird been up to?" The prisoner lifted his head, saw that Greg's body had been turned over on its face, saw Connors pointing to wires that coiled out of two tiny holes in the center of a shaved patch at the back of Vance's head. They trailed across the floor and were kinked where Thorkel's feet had caught in them in his mad, sacrificial rush at the black-swathed figure!

"We'd better send in a report, before we investigate further," Connors was saying as Thorkel's eyes clung bewilderedly to the metal threads. "Looks like the Borealis has quit. We ought to get the captain up here."

"Check! There's a communication set in the other room. And say, confirm this lad's claim that he is editor of New York Newscast." Connors went out, and his partner turned to the prisoner.

"What's the idea of the wires?"

"I don't know anything about them. Look here—"

The policeman jerked about, his Trinite gun suddenly in his hand. The outer door was slowly opening! Thorkel went rigid in his chair, expecting again the squat, jet-draped torturer. The one who strode in, though short, was a fur-clad bulk. Thorkel glimpsed his face. An incredulous shout leaped to his lips—"Cliff!"

Daniels' gun stabbed.

"Hands up, you! Up high!"

Cliff Hoskins' arms reached ceilingward, but his voice was unperturbed. "Hello. Dean. Glad you, at least, are safe." His calm tone steadied Thorkel, he was no longer friendless in an inimical world.

The police officer advanced threateningly.

"One of his gang, eh." His voice rose. "Connors! Oh, Joe! Come in here. There's another baby just popped in. Come in here and put the bracelets on him."

"No, cop. You're not putting any bracelets on me. On the contrary, you're taking them off Dean Thorkel, here."

Daniels' jaw thrust out, and his eyes slitted. "Oh yeah? Mighty sure of yourself, aren't you? Who the blazes do you think you are?"

"Lieutenant Hoskins, of the Army Intelligence Service. On special duty."

"More fairy stories! You birds sure tell them high, wide, and handsome."

"That will be enough low comedy from you. Take my thumbprints, check them with Headquarters." Authority snapped in Hoskins' voice. "Be quick about it too, if you want to save your jobs."

The flying policeman's tone was sullen as he saw credit for an important capture slipping from him.

"All right. All right. I'll check your thumbprints. But there's no need to get shirty. I'm just doing my duty."

"Right. But try to do it less unpleasantly." The thumbprinting was quickly accomplished, and Connors retreated to the televisophone. Daniels permitted Hoskins to lower his arms, but watched him wearily. Hoskins ignored him, spoke to Thorkel in low tones.

"We'll have you out of those as soon as the checkup comes through. I got wind of what was going on up here only a couple of hours ago, and I sure burned the stratosphere getting here from Harbin. Just what has happened?"

Thorkel's words tumbled over each other. Hoskins' face was expressionless, but his eyes grew granite-hard. "I can't figure it out at all," Thorkel ended. "There's something wrong, somewhere."

"Greg was already dead when you got the first message." Hoskins stated that humorlessly.

"Huh!"

"I'm not spoofing. The tip I got in Harbin gave me the picture. The Oriental spy reached here yesterday and tortured Vance to get the formula. Greg's leaky heart gave way. The spy had the cipher, but he had to get you up here to read it. He posed Greg's body in front of the visophone tube-eye and spoke from some hiding place nearby. The corpse started to topple, he had to pull the connection in a hurry. But he'd got what he wanted across."

Thorkel objected, almost pleadingly.

"But Greg opened the door for me. He motioned me in."

"That's the meaning of those wires. The Asiatic scientists have found that by applying an electric current of a certain intensity to the proper brain areas they can produce muscular reactions in a dead body similar to those the same areas controlled in life. It is merely a refinement of the ancient experiment of making a dead frog kick by electrifying the muscles themselves. You disturbed the adjustment when you touched Greg, and he dropped."

"He's Hoskins, all right." Connors' reentry cut the friends' colloquy short. "And H. Q. says we are to obey his orders to the letter."

Daniels flushed brick red.

"I'm sorry, Lieutenant," he stammered, "but I—"

"Forget it!" the Intelligence Man interrupted. "Unlock those cuffs. Then get out in your plane and scout for the killer."

As the door closed behind the cops Hoskins swung back to Thorkel.

"But they haven't the ghost of a show," the latter said. "The spy is halfway back to Manchukuo." Hoskins shook his head.

"He must be hanging around. As long as you're alive with the key to that formula he won't give up. That's why I sent the cops away. I'm sure he couldn't have spotted my arrival. He'll figure you've been left alone here, and return. We'll be ready for him this time. He's a sly fox, and we've got to be careful how we bait the trap. The stage must be set just right. Let's see—" Hoskins' eyes were glowing with a strange light. "Get back in that chair and play 'possum. I'll hide in the other room."

Thorkel sprawled in the chair, his head lolling.

"How's that?"

"Great! But keep your eyes closed. And—I almost forgot! You had better give me the keywords to the cipher in case anything goes wrong. He may get one of us."

"The keywords are—" Thorkel cut off.

Greg's unclosed, dead eyes seemed eerily to signal a message to him. Words echoed within his brain: 'Remember—give the formula to no one else, whoever he is, no matter what the circumstances.'

"Perhaps I had better not, Cliff," he said slowly. "Greg enjoined me to give the secret only to the Secretary of War, no matter what happened. I've a queer feeling that I should not disobey him."

Hoskins' black eyes blazed sudden wrath. Then, with a visible effort, he was smiling.

"Don't be a fool, old man. Greg could not have foreseen our present predicament. Besides, you know damn well that he would have entrusted the cipher to me, had I been available. He told me his plans months ago."

"You're right, Cliff. I'm a superstitious ass. The words are—" There was a jarring thud against the door, and sounds of a scuffle. A blast of cold swept in a struggling group. The two Flyies were back, and between them—Dean grunted in astonishment—between them was the wizened form of—Randall Haley!

Hoskins' words were thick with inexplicable fury!

"What's this?"

Daniels saluted.

"We spotted this guy going like blazes in one of them new one-man rocket planes, but we couldn't get within two hundred miles of his speed. He landed about a quarter-mile from here, concealed his plane and sneaked right up to this house. He was trying to listen at the door when we jumped him!"

4: Ha-Lung Unmasked

THORKEL stared at his assistant. Haley must have stolen the formula, must have known that he held the key. The damning facts tumbled into his brain chaotically. Information came to the Newscast editors' desks that was often suppressed—for the nation's good.

Haley's newscard would admit him where the general public was barred! Then Randall Haley was the Asiatic spy— Ho-Lung! He had returned to complete his crime, just as Cliff had predicted. Dean Thorkel leaped to his feet, flung out an accusing arm.

"Haley," he shouted. "Where's that paper? Where's the paper with the formula of the green ray?" His face was livid.

The little assistant editor appeared dazed. He retreated before Thorkel's fury, despite the Flyie's grasp on his arm.

"I don't understand, Mr. Thorkel," he twittered. "I—I came up here to get you out of trouble—to identify you. What—what paper are you talking about?"

"That acting won't get you anything, Haley, or Ho-Lung. You've got away with it for twenty years, but the game's up. You know what paper I mean; the paper you stole from my desk." Thorkel advanced on the man. Haley was against the wall, one foot was lifting, slowly, its sole scraping against the plaster. His lips trembled pathetically.

"—I don't know to what you refer. But—but if anything is missing from your desk, perhaps Mr. Hoskins can tell you about it. He looked through its drawers last night—said that you had sent him for something. I knew he was your friend and permitted it."

Thorkel thrust his face close to the bird-like countenance. "You lie, damn you."

"The whole night force will bear me out. Visophone them and ask."

There was ludicrous dignity in Haley's refutation, the ring of truth in his statement. Dean Thorkel wheeled to Hoskins, who had drawn a little apart. The chair was between, and Thorkel caught at it.

"What about it, Cliff?" A faint sneer lifted the Secret Service man's lip. His hand hovered very close to the butt of his holstered gun. "He's just playing for time, Dean."

For an instant Thorkel was irresolute, then something snapped in his brain. The holes in Hoskins' smoothly spun story were suddenly caverns to his sharpened perception. His fingers flattened against the metal of the chair.

"Maybe," he barked, "maybe you're right. You're so damn pat with your explanations of everything, suppose you explain a few more things. For instance, how you got here right on the spot, moments after the spy escaped, without the Flyies' having seen your plane. Why you were so all-fired anxious to get the keywords of the cipher out of me as soon as they were gone. And how it happened—I was a fool not to see it sooner—how on earth it happened that the faked call came in on my private line, the wave-length combination of which was known only to Greg, who was dead, and to you!"

Hoskins' glance flicked past Thorkel. His gun leaped from its holder. His eyes were twin pinpoints of menace. "I'll explain, Thorkel," his voice rang out. "And if anyone so much as twitches a finger I'll explain with Trinite spray. I am Ho-Lung! Vance escaped me when his heart gave way, but I'll get the formula from you, and all hell won't stop me!"

Death vibrated in the room's stunned silence. Hoskins—Ho-Lung—crouched, his lips retracted from white teeth. From the corner of his eye Thorkel saw Daniels leap to one side, hunting the shelter of a cupboard, dragging at his weapon. Blue flame darted from Hoskins' gun—once—twice—there was the spatter of pellets striking their target—and the flesh-muffled roar of the Trinite blast. The room rocked beneath Thorkel, and a warm liquid splashed across his face to haze his vision with a red mist.

As if of their own accord his hands jerked up the chair they grasped, hurled it at the momentarily distracted spy. Then he was off his feet, catapulting in its wake. Crack! The renegade's face squashed under the news-man's fist. Crack! Another hammer blow struck home. Hoskins was down, Thorkel swarming atop him.

He heard a faint cry—"Stop, Dean, stop it!"—but his hands were clamped about a soft throat, and berserk fury made his fingers a tightening vise.

Hands were pulling at Thorkel.

"Let up! Let go! Killing's too good for him," someone was shouting. He surged to his feet.

Daniels, white-faced, leaned against the wall. His left hand was gripped tightly about his right. He stared dazedly at a pool of blood on the floor, a pool fed by a diminishing stream from Haley's shattered, legless torso.

Suddenly the shambles disappeared from Dean Thorkel's consciousness. He darted to the body, jerked at a bit of black fabric protruding from the rags that had been his assistant's fur coat.

From his nerveless hand a black robe hung sleazily, and a long black bandage through which two eye-holes had been cut! Thorkel stooped again. His fingers, searching, encountered wires, a Trinite gun. Then paper rustled. He started at cryptic symbols that danced before his eyes, symbols in Greg Vance's familiar handwriting. It was the cipher—the cipher that held a nation's safety! The proof was complete. It was Randall Haley who had stolen the formula, Randall Haley who was the torturer! Then—what about Cliff Hoskins?

"God, Dean, you've got the kick of a mule," the self-convicted traitor mumbled, painfully lifting himself to a sitting posture, his mauled features twisting into a battered grin.

Thorkel held the disguise out toward Hoskins. "Then—then you are not Ho-Lung," he stammered.

Hoskins' grin became more pronounced. He wiped blood from his mouth.

"Oh yes, I am Ho-Lung," he said calmly. "I didn't lie."

"But—but—"

Hoskins laughed. "It's a bit complicated. I am Ho-Lung, one of Asiatica's most famous spies, and yet I am not a renegade to the white race, nor a traitor to the American Intelligence Service."

Thorkel's expression of dazed perplexity was pitiful. "I don't understand."

"I don't blame you. I was born in Asiatica, the son of American missionaries who were both killed in an accident soon afterward. I was adopted by Ho-Chien, an Asiatic high in the Secret Service of that country. He sent me to America to study, with the very brilliant idea that close acquaintance with our country's ways and customs would make me a most efficient spy indeed.

"What Ho-Chien did not count on was the call of my own people. At the University I realized that I was an American, a white. I realized that I could be of tremendous service to this country by pretending to continue to play the part of an Asiatic spy, while being in actuality a member of the American Intelligence Service. I told Ho-Chien that I was doing to America what I was actually doing to the Asiatics, that I was acting as a member of the American Service in order to further my work for the Easterners."

"But you—Ho-Lung—are notorious as a shrewd, cruel spy. The exploits with which Ho-Lung has been credited—"

Hoskins chuckled.

"Yes, I have built up quite a reputation for Ho-Lung, so much so that he has become a legend of terror. That, I imagine, is why Haley signed that name to his communications threatening Greg. And it was a sort of poetic justice. For the way Ho-Lung got his reputation was by stealing credit for the work of others.

"You see, the Oriental Service is so managed that no one agent is known to another. Each works independently, getting what aid he can manage if he needs help. It was easy, then, for me to drop hints that this, that, or the other deed was mine, careful hints that spread in just the right quarters. Of course, every so often I did turn in real information, obsolete plans of fortifications, specifications of armaments carefully altered so that they were useless, names of American spies whom I knew had already been discovered, or were in a place of safety.

"There was one operative, somewhere in America, who was particularly successful, and whose identity I could not ascertain. It was he who turned up what Greg Vance was doing, he who had charge of the operations in connection therewith."

"Randall Haley!"

"Randall Haley. He got the wave-length combination of your private line by the old device of a waxed sheet hidden in the memo pad on which you jotted it for me."

"But why did you denounce yourself as Ho-Lung?"

"Because if I hadn't we'd all be shreds of pulped flesh now, blown to bits. I wondered why Haley shrank against the wall, why his foot was lifting, scraping against it. And then I saw a tiny bit of metal, there, that fine wire running out through the door-edge." Hoskins pointed at it.

"I guessed what he was up to. The current he used for the torture wire came from a small, but powerful battery concealed in his clothing, the circuit grounded through the sole-nails in his shoe. If Asiatica could not have the formula, he was determined no-one should. If the contact in his shoe ever reached that wire, a spark would have set off a Trinity bomb he had previously buried beneath the ice just outside.

"My claim to be Ho-Lung confused him just long enough for me to get my gun out. The cop grabbed for his own gun. I had to shoot the gun out of his hands to save myself, and all of us. But I got Haley!"

"Great work," Thorkel exclaimed. "Yet Haley won anyway. We're alive and we've got the formula. But Vance is dead, and it will never be completed now."

"I wonder. What's on that other slip of paper? It fell out when you pulled the formula from the dead man's clothing. You were too excited to notice it."

Thorkel looked where his friend pointed. Then he snatched the bloody slip of paper up. Words were scrawled on it, five words that changed the history of the world.

"Increase third acid by 1.2%."

Dean Thorkel's voice dripped into the cold.

"Greg's handwriting. He finished it. He finished the formula." Thorkel pulled a sleeve across his forehead, clearing away a vision of blazing homes, of a yellow swarm pouring over a fair, happy land. "Let's get going to Washington, Cliff. They're waiting for the green ray."

Cliff Hoskins stuck out a big paw.

"Go ahead, old man," he rumbled. "I've got to get back to Manchukuo. There's work waiting for me there."

____________________________

9: The Two Moons Of Tranquillia

Weird Tales, January 1943

The charming old couple said they loved children, yet nobody would ever again see in this world the children they adopted.

1

GEORGE CARSON—Lieutenant George Carson, U.S.N., now—came in through the door on which is lettered the meaningless title, "Editorial Consultant," they gave me when they put me on the shelf.

"What the devil are you doing here?" I growled as he closed it and strode toward me. "I thought you were somewhere in the Atlantic, chasing U-boats."

"I was, Pop." He slung a long, blue-clothed leg over a corner of my desk, grinned down at me. "I'll be shoving off again by midnight." He looked ten years younger than when I'd last seen him. Wind and the sun had bronzed him, hooded his gaze with an eagle's drooped lids and the one or two threads of gray in his black hair served only to give him a certain solidity. "A bit of luck gave me the chance to wangle the first shore leave I've had in five months."

It might be luck, but with the word pain had come into his gray eyes and a slow smoulder of anger.

"Picked up a drifting ship's boat," he explained, "with some poor sons aboard more dead than alive."

"Jerry's got another one, has he?" I grabbed for my 'phone. "What—City Desk, Jen—What was it? Where—? Oh, okay." His face had gone blank. "Okay, George, I forgot. Quote. No information shall be published unless and until released by the Commandant, Third Naval District. Unquote. So the radio can spill it first," I added bitterly, "and make our headlines look like the March of Time a year behind the band. Now in 'eighteen—You wouldn't remember, you were in the Navy then too, but back in 'eighteen we—"

"Had to fight your way into the building through the crowds waiting for extras. Or was that the fracas in 'ninety-eight?"

"If you're hinting, you young whippersnapper, that I'm old enough to—What in blazes are you wasting time here for, any way? Why aren't you on your way up to Westchester to see your son?"

"No train till one-seven, which gives me about forty-five minutes—Listen, Pop. Something's come up that you—I wonder if you could help me out."

Fishing in a pocket of his uniform he looked and sounded exactly like the shy but earnest cub who when I was in the slot, in the twenties, used to come to me with a thousand eager questions.

"I picked up a copy of the Globe this morning, the first I've seen since Christmas, and—You know I always read the Agony Column first, don't you?"

"I ought to, seeing it was I tipped you that the personal ads are a good spot to find hints for off-trail items."

"This hit me in the eye." George put a torn-out clipping in front of me and added, an odd note of significance in his tone. "In today's sheet."

It was four lines of six point type, the first line light-face caps and small caps:

COUPLE WILL CARE

FOR THE DURATION
without charge child of widower
who wishes to volunteer
for military service.

Country Home.

'Phone Carseville-465.

I looked up. "This would have struck you just right five months ago, but—"

"It did. I answered that same ad five months ago, and parked Pete with the Old couple who'd inserted it." I'd been on vacation, I recalled. He'd been gone when I returned. "That's how I was able to get back into uniform without worrying about the brat."

"So someone else got the idea, so what? It's good, isn't it?"

"I said the same ad, Pop." He spoke quietly, but obviously he was disturbed. "Exactly the same, even to the 'phone number. I checked in my address book. It's the same people."

"Okay. Your Peter worked out well and they've decided to take in another kid."

"There isn't room for another. The Barrets live in a small bungalow and the one guest-room is tiny—"

"Two boys might share it, if they got one of these two-story beds you see advertised."

"Ye-e-es." He tautened again. "They don't specify a boy, Pop. Look here. See. They say child. Pete's twelve and—All right. Maybe I'm nuts but I've got a nagging sort of hunch. What I came down here for was to find out if that ad's appeared any other time since the lad's been up there."

"What would that prove?"

"Well..." I picked up the 'phone, told Jen to get me the Morgue, told Ed Brolles what I wanted. "Now suppose we get sensible, George," I suggested. "Have you any sane reason to suspect anything's wrong with the boy?"

"No. I haven't seen him since late January but he's written me fairly regularly." His breast pocket produced a packet of pencil-smudged half-sheets. "His letters are all pretty much alike." He pulled one from under the elastic that held them together, unfolded it. "Like this; 'Dear Dad. How are you? I'm fine. I hit a three bagger Saturday. We won, sixteen to twelve, and—'" George checked, brown fingers tightening on the paper. "I'll be damned," he said softly.

"What's hit you?"

He didn't answer. He put the letter down on the desk, selected another from the opposite side of the packet, glanced through it, grunted. "I thought I remembered...Listen, Pop. That letter's six weeks old. This one came yesterday, but listen—'I hit a three bagger Saturday. We won, sixteen to twelve.' What do you make of that?"

"Coincidence."

"Think so?" George had both papers on the desk, side by side, was looking back and forth between the two, lips compressed. Grim. "Take a look at this and see if you still think it's coincidence."

I bent over, studied the sheets. "I see what you mean. The rest of the wording is different, but those two statements, just alike, are in exactly the same relative positions on the two pages."

"As if," he half-whispered. "As if one was traced from the other."

"Mmm." I couldn't be positive without superimposing them, with a strong light behind, but it certainly looked as if every character of the endearing, childish scrawl on the one sheet were identical with its corresponding character on the other. "Yesterday's letter might be a patchwork of tracings from several earlier—Wait!" I exclaimed, abruptly relieved. "We've forgotten that you had the earlier letters. You certainly didn't give them to anyone to trace."

"No. No, I didn't. But the whole batch of these might have been prepared all at once, then mailed at inter—." The 'phone bell cut him off.

My hand beat his by a fraction of a second. "The Globe ought to make a special rate for those people." Ed has one of those telephone voices you can hear across the room. "That same ad's appeared a dozen times the last—"

"Thanks, fellow. That's all I wanted to know."

2

GEORGE'S eyes were gray steel, black-dotted by pinpoint pupils. "If they've done anything to Pete..." He slid off the desk and started stiff-kneed toward the door.

"Wait," I barked. "You've still got twenty minutes to make that train. I want to try something."

He swung around. "What?" but I was rattling the bar for Jen. She came in on the line and I told, her, "Get me Carseville 465."

"I didn't let them know I was coming," George cautioned. "I—" His mouth twitched. "I wanted to surprise Pete."

In my ear a low, musical voice said, "Hello. Who is it, please?"

"My name's Harold Gatlin." George tugged at the receiver and I moved it so he could get his ear to it too. "I'm calling with regard to your personal in this morning's New York Globe."

"You are interested in placing a child?"

"A little girl. Have you any preference?"

The woman hesitated. Or perhaps I imagined it. At any rate, her reply was definite when it came.

"Not at all."

I saw a brown hand tighten on the desk edge, its knuckles go white.

"How old is your daughter, Mr. Gatlin?"

"About ten," I replied. "But she is not my daughter. I am her grandfather."

"Her grandfather!" I was sure, this time, that the voice at the other end of the wire had changed. "I am afraid you do not quite understand," it said coldly. "What we have in mind is to release someone for military service—"

"You'll be doing exactly that in this case." The rather nebulous impulse that had prompted me to say "grandfather" was crystallizing into a definite plan. "My daughter is a trained nurse. Her hospital unit has been ordered overseas and she will have to resign unless Kay can find a home where she can be happy."

"Surely she could be happy with you."

"Surely. But, unfortunately, I too am leaving the country. I happen to be on the staff of a—a certain magazine," I'd almost said newspaper, realized just in time this would be too clear a tie-up with George, "and have been given an assignment that will keep me abroad indefinitely."

"I see." Her tone was still tentative. "Are there no relatives, or close friends perhaps, who can take care of the little girl?"

It was evident now what she was after. "None. Helen was divorced shortly after Kay was born and—Well," I ventured an embarrassed little laugh, "it would be about the worst possible thing for the child if she were to come under the influence of her father or his family. I'm sure you understand, Mrs. ——"

"Barret," she filled in. "Mary Barret. Yes. I think I do." She paused, began again. "Would you care to bring your granddaughter up here, Mr. Gatlin?"

There it was, on a silver platter. "Precisely what I had in mind."

"And her mother too, please. Mr. Barret will be here and we can all get to know each other before we make any final decisions. Shall we say for lunch tomorrow?"

George had only till midnight—"I'm afraid not. I shall have several important conferences and Helen will be on duty at the hospital. Would it be inconvenient if we were to skip the lunch and make it this afternoon?"

Not at all. They would be happy to have us. I jotted down the directions she gave me and after a final exchange of inanities, hung up.

George's jaw was ridged, with knotted small muscles, his nostrils pinched.

"It's being a girl didn't faze her."

"No," I agreed softly. "But did you get the rest of it? Your Mary Barret was plenty careful to make sure that no one would be dropping in unexpectedly—"

"Someone's going to drop on them, like a ton of coal, just as soon as that train—"

"Hold, it, son. Hold everything, we're not going up, there by train."

He stared. "We!"

"What the blue exes do you think you'd accomplish, rushing in there like a red-eyed bull, except to make things tough for Peter if there's really something wrong about that set-up? I'm keeping the appointment I just made, and if I don't know the whole layout before I've been in that house half an hour, I've been in the wrong business for forty-three years."

Shadows were blue in the hollows of his gaunt cheeks. "It won't work. They'll smell a rat when you show up there without this family you invented."

"The only thing I invented," I chuckled as once more I picked up the 'phone, "was that stuff about Helen's being a nurse—Oh, Jen. Will you ask Mrs. Clark to step in here, please?" I cradled the instrument. "She's been Martha Propper's assistant on the Woman's Page since about two weeks after you left us."

"You never told me you had a daughter."

"I never had One, till Kay Clark adopted me as her grandfather and her mother seconded the motion. Quite something, that youngster. She—But here's Helen."

AS SHE pulled the door shut behind her, she saw George. Her irises, a luminous brown flecked with gold, dilated slightly and for the briefest instant breath was caught between the warm, red bows of her lips. Then she turned to me.

"You asked to have me come in?"

Helen is long-flanked, slender, but her voice is a deep contralto underlaid by a vague huskiness that pulls at my old heartstrings. "I did." Her dark gray suit was professional enough looking, in spite of the sweater that moulded her curves, but something would have to be done about that unruly tousle of chestnut hair. "This is George Carson, Helen. I think you've heard me speak of him."

"Once or twice." The smile with which she acknowledged the introduction was frank. Friendly. "Did you know, Lieutenant, that not a single stick of literate copy has appeared in the Globe since you beat your typewriter into a torpedo tube?"

"I shouldn't wonder," he said, abstractedly looking at his wrist-watch. I watched the girl's upper lip start to curl, said, "Helen! You're going up to Westchester with us this afternoon. Right now."

"I couldn't possibly. I've got four more ways of disguising watercress as food to think up before deadline, and a column of lovelorn blah—"

"'Phone Kay's school to have her ready for us to pick up." I pushed creakingly to my feet. "I'm going downstairs to Circulation, to wangle the loan of a car out of Ramsey. Meet me out front in ten minutes."

Amusement crinkled the corners of Helen's eyes and mouth. "Perfect!" she exclaimed, applauding with silent palms.

"Call yourselves reporters?" snarled Scrooge, the demon editor. "Come with me and I'll show you how to get the story."

"Right. A story the radio won't beat us to, for once."

"It is—Oh, no." Her face fell. "No, you're kidding me. If it was, really, you wouldn't want Kay along."

"Kay's the key to the whole thing," I said from the door. I was to recall saying that, in a moment of horror. "George will explain, while you're getting your duds."

I stopped a moment to fix things up with Helen's boss. Martha's never liked me, but there's one advantage in being around a shop as long as I have. You know where all the skeletons are buried.

3

I DON'T know any landscape in the world more nostalgically lovely than New York's Westchester County. The rolling hills, brilliant with soft green flame, the blue-gray haze in the hollows, the limpid chatter of tumbling small streams—

You can have your Cote d'Azur before the war, your Isle of Capri. I'll take the Sawmill River Road in April.

I was driving, Kay was a vibrant little bundle of restlessness beside me. We'd told her only that when we got where we were going, we would pretend that I was her real grandfather, her mother an army nurse, and that we were looking for a place for her to live. "It's something for the paper," Helen had explained, "and so it's not really a lie but just making believe."

Which bit of sophistry had at least eased the mother's conscience, however it had been accepted by the child.

She was a brat, but a nice one. A sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of a tiny, tip-tilted nose, close-cropped hair the color of honey—one sometimes surprised a wistfulness in Kay's pert countenance that vanished the instant she knew herself observed. Left almost from infancy to her own devices, and the scant supervision of such maids-by-the-day as a very slim purse could afford, she was altogether self-sufficient yet on occasion she could display a surprising capacity for deep affection.

Just why she'd chosen to extend this to the crusty, cynical old curmudgeon I am, I never pretended to comprehend.

"Don't forget, Pop." George broke in on my thoughts. "You turn off into a side road, left, just beyond that curve ahead."

"I'm driving this car," I growled, "and I don't need any help." I glanced up into the rear-view mirror, discreetly tilted to reflect the rear compartment. He sat bolt upright at one end of the seat, expressionless except for the throb, throb of his temple. Helen was in the other corner, as far as she could get from him.

I'd manoeuvred to get them back there together, with the disingenuous statement that the car had been loaned to me on my express promise that I alone would drive it, and the help of Kay's insistence on riding up front. I had my trouble for my pains. Helen's half-hearted attempts at conversation had elicited only monosyllabic grunts from her companion, and she'd finally sunk into a brown study of her own.

I couldn't blame George. Peter was more to him than his son. He was the living memory of the wife whose death, six years ago, had come near to breaking the man.

Slowing on the long curve and watching for a chance to break through the opposing flow of traffic to the side road whose narrow entrance was banked with azaleas, I decided that there must be at least ten years between those two. Helen had been eighteen when she'd contracted the unfortunate marriage that had lasted only long enough to produce Kay. The girl had had a tough time, but she'd won—

The azaleas brushed the car's sides and their fragrance filled it. "Oh, shucks, gran'pa Harry," Kay pouted. "Now I can't watch it any more."

"See what, grandchild Kay?"

"A tomahawk, I think it was; I'd have been sure in another second."

"That you'd seen a tomahawk?" I teased. "I didn't know there were any more Indians in these parts."

She giggled, delighted at my mistake. "A Curtiss Tomahawk, gran'pa. A pursuit plane. It was flying around and around, way high up, and all of a sudden it started to fly straight, like the pilot saw something. Do you think it was Jap bombers he saw, maybe? Do you think maybe they're coming to bomb New York and kill a lot of people and—?"

"Stop it, Kay!" Helen's voice was sharper than I'd ever heard it to her daughter. "Stop it this instant!" And then she was apologizing. "All this is so peaceful, I'd forgotten all about the war. Please find something else to talk about, sweetheart."

"Why should she?" George demanded harshly. "What else is there to talk about? Or think about?"

SHE twisted to him. "But not the children, Lieutenant Carson. Please. Not the children."

He looked at her, not really seeing her. "Do you think you can hide from them the filthy world we've made for them to live in?"

"We ought to try—"

"Ought we? Listen, Mrs. Clark. In the lifeboat we picked up last night there was a refugee boy, six, or seven years old by his size. His size was the only way you could tell anything about him. He'd been burned—They told me at the Naval Hospital that he will live, that they're hopeful he will not be badly scarred. His body, they meant. What about the scars on his soul, do you think?"

Reaching brush whispered along the sides of the car but within the car there was only the hiss of Helen's pulled-in breath.

"Listen," George said again. "I used to read to my son from the great books of all time, I used to take him to the art galleries, the concert halls, teaching him what beauty man can create. Other times we would go where some skyscraper, some bridge, was being erected, some tunnel dug, learning what strength and usefulness man can build. And if I happened to write a line that sang, a paragraph that shone, I carried it home to Peter in my hands, and he was very proud of his father."

He laughed; shortly, bitterly. "What have I now to show my son, to bring home to him? Congratulate your old man, Pete. Today I dropped a depthbomb and blasted a submarine—"

"Gee!" Kay broke in, wide-eyed. "Gee, did you? That's swell. Was it a German one?"

"Kay! You—"

"No, Mrs. Clark. It's no use." George came around to her daughter, his lips—only his lips—smiling. "Yes, it was a German, Kay. We know, because some things came up to the top of the water, splintered wood, shattered—Well, things that float.

"One was a kit box that must have belonged to one of the sailors. It was watertight and among the other things in it there was a picture of a blonde little girl, about your age only she had a little button of a nose and pigtails. On the picture was written, 'Komm bald deinem Elsa zuruck, Vater,' which in English means, 'Come back soon to your Elsa, father,' but Elsa's father won't ever come back to her because I killed him. Isn't that a pity?"

Kay nodded, speechless for once. "Oh," George exclaimed. "I forgot! We're certain it was that very submarine which torpedoed the ship that had almost brought the little boy I was talking about safe to America. It might even have been Elsa's father who aimed the torpedo."

"That's different. I'm glad you killed him. I'm awful glad."

There was an incoherent sound in Helen's throat, then—"You—You're despicable, George Carson!"

He swung back to her. "Of course I am. So are we all. We're all trapped in a despicable, brutal world and there's no escape; no longer the slightest possibility of escape for me or you or Kay or Pete—Pete," he repeated, the name a groan, and he sank back into his corner, hands closing into tight fists on his thighs.

AFTER that there was no more talk, except for Kay's chatter. The road climbed steadily through a rustling, second-growth thicket and for all the sign of human habitation we might have been five thousand miles from New York instead of fifty. We crested a hill, glimpsed the distant Tappan Zee, in the sky above its silver shimmer a V of black planes flying South. The woods closed around us once more as the road dipped into leafy shadow.

My mind clung to those planes. There had been a waspish sort of haste about their flight, an odd sense of urgency. They were ours, of course. They must be ours. If they were not, the guns I knew to be hidden all through this placid countryside would be blasting— Light struck through slim, young boles ahead and I started braking.

I checked the figures on my speedometer. "Thirteen miles from the Sawmill River. This must be it."

George had his car door open before the car had stopped. I caught up with him and we made as little noise as we could, working through underbrush. We reached the edge of the thicket and peered through a green screen of brambles.

A lush meadow sloped gently away from before us, affording pasturage to a half-dozen brown and white cows. In the hollow below was a grove of tall old maples and beneath their leafy spread nestled a low-roofed small house, its shingled walls mottled gray and brown and velvet green by moss and weather.

"Yes," George breathed. "That's it."

The sun struck through the trees, brightening the rear of the house and the shadows it cast were deep purple—George's fingers dug into my arm, bruising. "Look there, Pop. In that bush." His grip transmitted to me the tremor that ran through him. "See it?"

I located what he meant, one of those model planes boys build and fly. It was caught, nose down, in a welter of thorny withes not five yards from us, rain-spattered, stained by mold but seemingly intact. "That's Pete's," George whispered. "That design painted on the fuselage, it's one he worked out for himself and he put it on all his planes."

"So what? We know he was here. What we're out to find out is if he's here now."

"We've found out. Pete would never have let that plane rot like that if he could help it. Even when one of his models smashed up, he always salvaged what parts he could for the next one. He isn't here and he hasn't been here for weeks."

It was abruptly chilly, there at the edge of the woods. "Okay," I said. "You wait here while we go down and find out where he is, and why."

It took almost physical persuasion to get him to agree.

4

THE room, extending all across the front of the house, was low-ceilinged, its woodwork dark with the mellow patina of the years but dancing flames in a fieldstone fireplace, a missing of flowers in the deep-silled, many-paned windows, made it very cheerful. The furniture, much used but not shabby, had a timeless grace of line that made altogether appropriate the juxtaposition of, say, the plum-colored Georgian sofa where Kay sat demurely beside her, mother with the Hepplewhite chair Mary Barret occupied.

"Yes, Mrs. Clark." Her low voice was as musical as I'd heard it in the telephone. "John and I always have loved children, though we've never had any of our own."

"I suppose that was what prompted this plan of yours."

"Yes," John Barret replied. "We wanted to help, and it seemed the best way."

He stood behind his wife, blue-veined hand on her shoulder in an unschooled gesture of affection. As so often happens when two people have lived long together, there was a definite physical resemblance between the white-haired couple. Both had the same broad, thoughtful brows, the same clear transparency of skin that age had not so much wrinkled as brushed with a tracery of fine lines that crinkled with kindly humor at the corners of bright little eyes and emphasized the sensitiveness of thin, pale lips.

"The only way we could."

"It's a wonderful way," Helen smiled. "I was at my wit's ends what to do."

About both the old people, she in her modest black silk dress with its relieving, creamy lace at the throat, he in a well-worn velvet smoking jacket open to reveal a high-cut, lapelled vest and Ascot cravat, there was a fragile, almost spiritual quality utterly disarming to anyone but a newspaperman who cynically recalled a certain woman convicted for swindling her fellow church members, the sanctified countenance of a certain mass poisoner.

The wall opposite that through which he had entered was, save for a single, closed door, completely covered with books and I was putting this circumstance to good use. No book-lover could find anything alarming in a visitor's browsing along his shelves but such a random occupation can cover a very thorough visual scrutiny of a room.

This one was warmly lived in, but nowhere was there any hint of the kind of disorder with which even the best behaved boy of twelve inevitably betrays his presence in a home.

"At my wits' ends," Helen repeated. "Nurses are needed so desperately with our Expeditionary Forces, but I have a duty to my daughter too. She did not ask me to bring her into the world."

"No," Barret agreed with the cliche. "She did not. A mother's first duty is to her child, but I'm positive Kay will be very happy with us."

"I'm sure of that, now that I've met you both. There's only one thing that still troubles me—Won't my little girl be lonely here, without any other children for company?"

"No," the woman responded, with assurance. "I can guarantee that she will not be lonely."

"Then you do have another child here!" Clever girl! "I suppose he's at school?" Neat. Very neat. "Will he be home soon enough for us to meet him?" She'd rocked them right back on their heels.

IF SHE had, Mary Barret made a quick recovery.

"Unfortunately, our little house is too small for more than one youngster—but I want you to see the rest of it." She rose, held out a hand to Kay. "Come, my dear, and see the lovely room that will be yours if your mother decides to let you stay with us for a while. You'd like her to, wouldn't you?"

"Oh, yes!" Kay jumped up and came eagerly to her. "You're awful nice." No child could simulate her glowing enthusiasm. "And he is too. You're almost as nice as Moms and gran'pa Harry."

Don't ever tell me again, I thought, that a child's instinct is unerring.

Helen got to her feet to join them and John Barret came toward me. "Ah, Mr. Gatlin," he smiled. "I see you've found the most prized of my possessions."

"The—" I glanced down at the book in my hand. It was open to a page of abstruse mathematical formulae. "I'm afraid this is quite meaningless to me."

"I shouldn't wonder," he chuckled. "There are supposed to be only a dozen men in the world who can really understand it. But have you seen the flyleaf?"

"Why no." I turned to it, found an inscription in an angular, very foreign hand. "Mmm. Most interesting. 'To John Barret, who has progressed much farther along the path we both tread than I can ever hope to.'"

The signature was that of the foremost physicist of our day.

"He was altogether too kind when he wrote that," the old man murmured. "All I've done is to find a practical application of his discovery of the essential identity of Space and Time, Matter and Energy. I—"

"John, dear," his wife's gentle tones intervened. "Don't you think Mr. Gatlin would like to look around with us? I'm as proud of my kitchen," she favored me with that vague, sweet smile of hers, "as John is of his books."

"You have every right to be," Helen's voice came from somewhere beyond the now open door in the book-lined wall. "Just look at this, Father!"

I crossed a dim hallway, went in through another doorway. The white-tiled room was walled on one side by enamelled cupboards, chromium trimmed. A solid-fronted counter ran the full length of the other side, its grayish monel metal glowing in the sunlight that poured through a gayly curtained window open to the rustle of the maples and smells of spring.

"Where's the stove?" I demanded. "The refrigerator? The sink? I'm a brass monkey if this looks like a kitchen."

Barret laughed softly, going past me to the counter. He touched something. A panel lifted up out of the top to reveal the spiraled wires of an electric range. Another flick of his hand exposed a rectangular basin, two feet deep, containing a large, circular wire basket.

Kay was beside him, excited. "What's that for?"

"You stack your dirty dishes in there, honey, and—" He must have toed a pedal in the base for abruptly steaming water sprayed into the cavity, from beneath its upper rim. The lashing jets met, swirled. Suddenly the wire basket was filled with a foaming mass of soap suds, as suddenly the sprays were clear water again, magically rinsing away the soap.

Barret chuckled. "Now isn't that an easy way to wash dishes, Kay?"

"It's swell. But you still got to wipe them."

"No you don't." The basket was revolving. It was whirling so fast that it seemed to have disappeared. "You just whisk the wet away." The panels closed down, as if of their own motion. "It's all done by pressing these buttons—see here—along the edge of the counter."

"What else is there?" Kay demanded.

"Well—I tell you what. Suppose you push all the buttons you can find and see what happens." Barret turned to me, for all his silver hair very much like a youngster showing off. "Some of the devices in here I bought. Most I constructed myself, and even those manufactured by others I've found ways to improve."

"Very clever," I grunted.

"You certainly have a way with children." Helen was admiring. "You couldn't have thrilled Kay more than you've done, by letting her play with those gadgets, but I should think a boy would be in Seventh Heaven." That was almost too obvious. "A little older boy. About twelve, say."

"Quite right. Now I recall when—"

"Shall we go look at the other rooms?" Once more Mary Barret interrupted her husband, and this time I was positive she deliberately was forestalling some indiscretion.

"It's getting on, and you ought to start back early enough to be on the Parkway before dark, that road through the woods can be treacherous at night." Yet, as she took Helen's arm and urged her out into the hall, she was just a smiling little old lady as demure and naive seeming, as the one Whistler once painted. "You have no idea how dark it gets."

"Why, Mary," Barret protested. "It's only three-thirty." He waited at the door for me to pass out. "They've plenty of time."

I took my time about it, so that when I reached the passage the women were well down toward its end. As the old man started to follow I blocked him off and demanded, low-toned but imperatively, "Where's Peter Carson?"

5

HE WAS startled, no doubt of that. Shocked.

"Come across," I growled. "What have you done with the lad?"

His gray lips quivered—The house was shaken by a dull thud!

A rolling growl was like distant thunder, but through the kitchen window the leaf-fretted sky was blue and cloudless. Once more the thud; and again, and the far-off rumble once more. "John!" There was alarm in Mary Barret's cry. "Those planes before—Are those bombs, John? Are they bombing New York?" and that reminded me of Kay asking the same question on the Sawmill River Road and I realized I did not see her back there in the kitchen.

"Kay," I called, going back in. "Where are you?" A giggle pulled my eyes to a hitherto unnoticed door in the sidewall beyond the end of the row of cupboards. "Kay!" A dress hem flicked in the narrowing space between door-edge and jamb, and the door slammed shut. I reached it, grasped the knob. "Come out of there, you little imp."

The door refused to open.

Barret reached me and I heard Helen, beyond him. Against the gray enamel of the door-frame the chromium disk of a Yale lock glittered. "Kay!" I called again, rapping the wood with my knuckles.

"Oh, John," Mary Barret sighed, reproachfully. "You forgot again to make sure you'd pulled it tight." A bunch of keys clinked in her husband's hand. "Open it. Quickly. Before—" She checked, fingers going to her mouth, pupils dilating.

Abruptly the floor had commenced to vibrate. It was as if someone held an electric massage machine against my soles, and, the sensation was oddly frightening.

Barret's key chattered against the lock, fell away. He looked at his wife, gray lips shaping a word that would not come. The vibration stopped, as abruptly as it had begun and I snatched the bunch of keys from him, jabbed the one he'd selected into the serrated slit in the shining disk. Someone caught at me but I had the door open, was going through it into a small windowless room.

A closet rather, it was barely six feet square. Its walls and floor were of dull lead, the ceiling also. The sunlight following me in was fractured into a myriad gleaming spears by the intricate, polished metal of a machine that head-high, unfamiliar, took up the cubicle's central half.

"Kay!" Helen called as she entered. "Kay! Where are you hiding?"

"She must be in back of this." I went around the machine—stopped short. There was enough light back here to show me every inch of the space. There was no other door. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could conceal so much as a rabbit but there was no Kay.

"Where is she?" Helen's eyes were large and dark and appalled in a face suddenly chalk-white. "What has happened to my child?" and it was then I recalled saying in my office, 'Kay's the key to the whole thing,' and answered her, hoarsely. "The same as happened to Peter Carson."

"Please." John Barret laid a trembling hand on her arm. "Please, Mrs. Clark, don't be alarmed. Your daughter is quite safe. A little frightened perhaps, but that is all. We can fetch her back in a twinkling if you and Mr. Gatlin will be good enough to step out into the kitchen and close the door—"

"So you can make your getaway through the same trapdoor she blundered into?" Over my first bewilderment, I'd guessed the answer. "What kind of fools do you think we are?"

"But I assure you there is no—"

"It's no use, John," Mrs. Barret broke in. "We'll have to explain. Perhaps when they understand—"

"Explain be damned! Bring Kay back and then start explaining about Peter—"

"Hop to it," George Carson bellowed, abruptly thudding in. "Pronto!" Barret spun to him, recoiled from the sudden, threatening apparition—slipped, fell heavily—

And lay motionless.

"John!" the old woman gasped, went to her knees beside the sprawled, frail form. "John!"

"If you think I could stay up there in the woods, wondering what was happening here," George answered my unspoken question, "You're crazy. I was crouched under that kitchen window when things broke loose in here, and my clasp knife was enough to get me in through the back door—"

"It's his heart spell!" Mrs. Barret was up again. "I've got to get his drops." She evaded George's clutch at her, darted out. We both sprang after her jammed in the doorway.

HELEN'S, "Let her go," pulled us back in again. "We don't need her. Kay saw something the moment she came in here, a—"

"Pushbutton!" I exclaimed, a step ahead of her words. "Like the ones he told her she could monkey with. Of course." I pointed to a vertical slab of bluish soapstone riveted to the machine, facing the door. "Here it is." I jabbed the button inset in the stone, glanced around the gray walls for a panel to start sliding open, at the floor for a trapdoor to appear.

Nothing happened.

"Maybe there's another—"

"Hold it, Pop!" George cut in. "Hold everything. See this copper plate on the jamb here and this strap spring on the edge of the door? They match up. I'll bet he's fixed them to break the power circuit so that the thing doesn't work unless this is closed." The lock clicked as he shut it. Blue-white glare struck down at us from a fluorescent double-tube in the ceiling. "Try it now."

I obeyed. Nothing in the room moved. But the floor was vibrating again. Not only the floor. The lead walls. The air they enclosed. The vibration intensified swiftly, took hold of me every nerve, cell—

Blackness smashed into the cubicle!

Something jarred. That's the wrong word. It was as if a stratum of rock on which the house stood had grated bodily along another stratum beneath it.

The dreadful tremor ended, that same instant, but the blackness remained, thumbing my eyeballs. "If I was aboard ship," George said somewhere within it, "I'd swear a depth-bomb just went off under our keel," and then his breath caught and I knew he'd recalled, as I had, the distant thuds, the far-off rumble of what had not sounded quite like thunder. "Let's get some light on the subject," he suggested evenly. "I think I've a pack of matches—Yes."

As he-scratched one, I was thinking of how in England frustrated bombers would jettison their loads of death over some un-alarmed countryside and how people were sometimes buried alive for days beneath the ruins of just such isolated small houses as this.

The tiny flame blossomed. Its feeble flicker, brought George's set, gaunt countenance out of the darkness, wavered over Helen, straight and still, hand denting her sweatered breast. There should be a wall behind her. The match should be burning straight up, steady, in the windowless room where no one moved, not wavering in the soft and inexplicable breeze I felt stroking my cheek.

This should be a lead covered floor on which John Barret lay sprawling and somehow pathetic, not rough-surfaced stone.

I stared into the depths of dark space not thinking yet, not daring to think—Small feet scampered, somewhere out there! "Mumsy," a childish treble piped. "Grand'pa Harry." Kay ran into the dim, dancing circle of luminance, flung thin arms about her mother's waist and sobbed, "Oh, mumsy. I've been looking and looking for you, all over."

All over where? In the name of sanity, where were we?

6

"IT'S a huge cave."

George Carson had struck another match and high above us some bits of mica sparkled.

"A cave," I repeated, as if by the reiteration I could make it seem reasonable.

"A bomb blasted a hole and we've dropped into it."

"Without even shaking us up, or smashing that machine?" I didn't need him to point that out. "And besides, Kay was here before us, wherever here is—Ouch!" The match arced away, went out. "Burned myself." I heard George blow on his fingers and somehow the familiar act eased the hollow, empty feeling at the pit of my stomach. "Wait a second. I'll light another."

"Hadn't you better go easy on them?" Helen's voice was amazingly steady, coming out of the tarry sightlessness. "You've only the one book, haven't you?"

"Right. But we've got to find a way out of here-and we can't do it in the dark."

"It wasn't dark here at first." That was Kay. "Not black dark like this." She sounded her normal self again instead of the terrified little tyke who'd scampered to us out of the unknown, and I realized why Helen held herself so sternly under control. "There was a little light coming in, from way off there."

"Was there, dear? Tell mother—You came in the door from the kitchen and then what?"

"Gran'pa Harry called me but I closed it to tease him and I saw this button and pushed it—He said I could, Mom. You heard him say I could push all the buttons and see what happened."

"I certainly did, sweetheart. You couldn't know he didn't mean this one. So you pushed the button, and then?"

"And then everything started shivering and all of a sudden the light went out. I—I went back to the door to get out, but there wasn't any door. I kept going farther and farther and I couldn't feel the door or the wall or anything. And I called you and you didn't answer and it was big in here and I couldn't see anything and there was nobody."

It was the breathless way she told it, rather than what she told, that made it so graphic. The blind groping in sudden, vast darkness. The calls echoing and reechoing and bringing no response. The realization of aloneness.

"I stopped calling and stood still, and it wasn't so awful dark any more. Like when you go in a movie theatre, Mom. You can't see anything right at first but pretty soon you can. You know?"

"Yes, Kay. I know. What did you see?"

"Well, far away there was this hole, like, where the light was coming in and I was in this great big place, just stone all around, all empty. I was awful scared.

"I wanted to run to the light but I remembered how when I was a little kid you used to tell me if I got lost I should stay right where I was and you'd come and find me, so I didn't. But you didn't come and it got too dark to see, and I didn't know what to do. And then all of a sudden I heard people talking and this match lit up and it was you and gran'pa Harry and—Oh, Moms! I don't like it here."

"I don't like it here either dear. I'm sure none of us do."

"Then why don't we go back?"

Helen laughed a little helplessly. I wondered how she was going to answer that, how to avoid the issue. "We want to, Kay," she said, matter-of-fact. "But we don't know how."

She hadn't avoided it. I realized that treating the little girl frankly, as an adult, she was wiser than I should have been. Very much wiser. "Why that's easy, Mom," Kay was saying. "You just push another button. Like the elevator in our house."

"'Out of the mouth of a babe,'" I quoted softly. "Is my face red. How about some light, George?"

His fingers pawed at my sleeve, traveled down it and thrust the packet into my hand. "Here."

"Afraid you'll burn yourself again?" I tore off a match, struck it. The unsteady light was multiplied by the maze of curiously twisted rods and wire coils. George bent to Barret, at the machine's base, lifted the fragile body and put it across his shoulder. "What's the big idea?"

The eyes he turned to me were sultry. "Pete's somewhere here, Pop. I'm not going back till I find him or—"

The corners of his mouth twitched. He wheeled, strode away into the dark.

I started to call to him, changed my mind.

"All right, Helen."

"But—"

"Push that button," I snapped, backing away, "before this match burns out. You've got Kay to think about."

"You're not coming with—"

"I'm the demon editor, remember? On a story. Your angle's Mary Barret. Get—"

"There's just the one button, Mother." Kay, at the slab, had not heard this interchange. "I can't find any other."

"It must work both ways." I was now well outside the distance the cubicle walls had been from the machine. "Push it!" Her little thumb went to the stone. Flame stung and I flipped the match away. "It doesn't work," Kay wailed. "It's busted."

7

THE fourth match showed me Helen hugging her small daughter to her. "George," I called. "George Carson! We need you." He emerged from the shadows, carrying Barret as though the old man had no weight at all. "The Navy's press agents pull a good line about all sailors being ace mechanics. How about your fixing that elevator?"

He put down his burden, went to the contraption. I struck five more matches before he reported, "I can't find anything obviously loose or out of place. If I juggle with it, regardless, I may do some irreparable damage." The light went out, we were in the dark again. "You'll just have to wait here till the old devil comes to."

Suppose he doesn't, I asked myself. He looked rotten. Suppose he dies on us?

"We will have to wait here," Helen was exclaiming. "We! What about you?"

"I'm going to look for my son." His footfalls started away. "Come back here, you young nincompoop," I barked. "Helen's in this jam because she wanted to help you. Where do you think you get off, walking out on her?"

The footsteps hesitated, returned. "Okay, Pop. You win. What do you want me to do?"

"The least you can do is stay with us. What good do you think I would be if— Well, if anything happened?"

Silence gathered about us. Except for a faint whisper of breathing the blackness held no sound at all. No drip, drip of seepage, no scutter of anything living. It was as though the unseen walls moved in on us, entombing us.

"We can't!" A thin edge of hysteria had at last come into Helen's voice. "We can't just stand around here in this awful dark. We'll go— Let's do something. Let's try and find some way out of this— this cave."

"Which direction," I wanted to know, "would you start looking?"

George had the answer. "This breeze must be coming from the cave's mouth. All we have to do is walk into it. It's worth trying, isn't it?"

"It might be, if we could be sure of finding our way back here. If we had a ball of cord—"

"We have," Helen offered. "Not a ball but something just as good. My sweater. I can start the wool at the hem and it will unravel as we go along—"

"That's the ticket," George approved. "That's what we'll do," so eagerly that I didn't bring up any more objections although I could think of plenty. We used one more of our now scanty supply of matches while Helen tied the end of a thread plucked from the bottom edge of her sweater to the machine, tested it to make sure it would pull out easily.

"We've got to keep touching one another," I reminded them, "so we don't get separated. I'll lead."

George lifted Barret to his shoulder again. We started out. We went very slowly, because I tested each step to make sure the darkness did not conceal a pitfall. Concentrating on each inch of progress, I was still aware of the deep, brooding silence the small noises we made did not so much disturb as accentuate. No one spoke, not even Kay except once when she complained that Helen was squeezing her hand so tightly it hurt.

The cave floor sloped gradually upward. The breeze freshened and it began to carry faint odors, the brown smell of earth, the green smell of vegetation. These brought me both an easing of tension and a pulse-throb of apprehension. What was waiting for us out there, where a paling of the dark promised the end of this interminable groping?

There was a rustle of foliage. Almost abruptly, I was in the open.

I stopped just in time. A foot ahead of me was the sharp edge of a ledge. "Hold it," I whispered. I don't quite know why I did whisper. It wasn't because I was afraid of being overheard. I think it was awe, inspired by a sense of immense height, of isolation under the vast, gold-dusted dome of velvet sky that confronted me.

A little below my level moving air soughed through a boundless black mass, the swaying roof, it dawned on me, of a forest.

Helen's shoulder pressed against mine. I heard George gasp. "Oooh," Kay breathed. "Ooooh," and then, "It's night. Gee, how did it get to be night so fast?"

So fast was right. It could not be more than an hour, if it was that, since in his sun-flooded kitchen John Barret had said, "It's only three-thirty. Three-thirty War Time, what's more, not sun time."

No one had answered Kay, but that didn't bother her. "Look at the stars, Mom," she prattled on. "They're so bright and near you can pick them right out of the sky." Her small hand reached out, as if to pluck one.

"They're all wrong," George was puzzled— something more than puzzled. "I can't spot a single constellation I know. If I had to navigate by these stars, I'd be lost."

"We are lost, George." Helen clutched Kay to her. "We're lost in Time and Space." She buried her face in the little girl's hair and I saw her shoulders tremble.

AS unbelievable as what she'd said was that Helen Clark should have gone to pieces. I gaped in dismay and George Carson took an involuntary step toward her.

She straightened up before he could reach her. "Isn't it thrilling, Kay?" she cried, with just the right note of enthusiasm. "Just think what you can write the next time your English teacher asks for a composition about an interesting true experience!"

The child looked up. For an instant, from her expression, I was sure she'd not been deceived but abruptly she laughed, exclaimed, "Oh, Mother. You ought to see how funny you look with just the top of your sweater left around your neck."

"Goodness!" Helen snatched at the hems of her suit coat, pulled it together over a sheen of silk colorless in the starlight. "Am I, glad I felt reckless this morning and put on my best slip."

All this eased the tension. At my suggestion we moved back just within the cave. George put Barret down, pillowed the white-maned head on his own rolled-up smoking jacket. Kay broke off the sweater thread, carried it to one side to tie it to a little knob of rock she spied. We found ourselves discussing our next step as matter of factly as if we'd missed a train or had run out of gas on the road.

He wanted us to remain here while he went exploring. I overruled him. "You've got to stay herewith Helen and Kay. I'm the one to do any poking around that's necessary."

"Nonsense," he snorted and Helen added her protest. "You can't either of you accomplish anything in the night. The sensible thing is for us all to stay together till sunrise. Maybe Mr. Barret will wake up before that and then our troubles will all be over."

"How is he?" I asked.

George bent to him. "Pulse seems pretty feeble," he reported, "but it's even enough and his breathing is steady. No sign, though, that he's coming out of it."

"Well..."

"I'm thirsty," Kay complained. "And I'm getting hungry too."

"You're thirsty and hungry are you?"

I rumpled her hair. "Okay, grandchild Kay. Let's you and I run around the corner to the drug store and I'll buy you a tongue sandwich and a chocolate malted milk. Or do you like vanilla better?"

She giggled, subsided. "Now, George. Getting back to—"

"Hush," Helen interrupted. "Listen!"

She'd turned to the opening, was staring out, tousled head a little to one side, lips parted. I could make out only the susurrus of the treetops, nothing else. Not even the nocturnal shrill of cicadas or the peep of a bird disturbed in sleep. "I thought I— There! There it is again!"

"I still don't hear anything."

"I do," Kay piped. "People singing," and some shift of the breeze brought it to me too. Faintly. The merest shadow of melody that brushed some vaguely familiar chord.

A long stride took George to the ledge. The music faded— welled up again. Briefly the words were distinct;

"...no more, my lady. Oh, weep no more today..."

and died again beneath the vast, dark rustle of foliage.

There was no longer anything to dread in the luminous night. Where "My Old Kentucky Home" was being sung under the stars, no matter how strange the stars might be, there could be nothing to fear.

I started to say something to that effect, was checked by the touch of Helen's fingers on my sleeve. She motioned to George. Within the cave-mouth's jagged black frame he was silhouetted, stalwart and unmoving against those alien stars, in the grip of some strong emotion.

As we watched him, some vagrant trick of the wind once more brought us the singing, this time even more dearly than before, so clearly that we thought it was children's voices we heard in the rollicking, roguishly gay song to which they'd shifted:

...think the world is made for fun and frolic,
And so do I.
And so do I.
Some think it well to be all melancholic
To pine and sigh.
But I, I spend my time in singing—"

George groaned. Even in the pallid starlight I could discern the torment in his face. "Pete and I used to—Did you hear that?" he broke off. "Pop! Did you hear—? 'Some happy song.'" He was visibly trembling. "They did just sing that, didn't they? I didn't imagine it? 'Happy song.'"

"Why yes," I replied, wondering. "Seems to me that's wrong, but—"

"Of course it's wrong! It should be joyous, but Pete's always sung it happy, and—"

"You think it may be your Peter who taught it that way to the others." Helen's hand was on his arm, impulsively. "It must be Peter. Oh, George! He's down there and since he's singing he's well and happy."

"Maybe. I hope you're right, but I don't dare let myself—I'm climbing down there. Right now!"

"Can I go with him, mom?" Kay tugged at her mother's skirt. "Can I?"

"We're all going, honey. Come on."

"Hey." George had already started off. "I can't carry the old man."

"Leave him," he flung over his shoulder.

"Suppose he wakes up and escapes? We'll have no way of finding out how to get back to civilization."

"What do you think this is? We don't have to rely on him any longer—Okay. Stay here if you want to."

There, was nothing for me to do but follow. The ledge was only about three feet wide, but it was so smooth and sloped downward so gradually that there was no sense of peril.

Above us rose the escarpment to whose face it clung, topless, vertical rock starkly naked of vegetation and unsubstantial seeming in the stellar glimmer. What was it? The Palisades? That high cliff along the Hudson would be dwarfed into insignificance by this Himalayan height.

Even in the Himalayas, most gigantic of Earth's ranges, this precipice would be colossal.

8

"YOU'VE decided to stop at last, have you? So even the iron man gets tired."

George gave no sign he'd heard me. He just stood there, shoulders hunched, blunt jaw out-thrust, peering through the leaf-flecked shadows. I shrugged, leaned my back against a tree trunk, too tired for either resentment or curiosity.

Helen must be as weary as I, but she was a woman.

"What is it, George? What do you see?"

The slow downward slant of the ledge had taken us some three miles or more from the point below the cave where the singing had seemed to come. We'd had all that distance to retrace, guiding ourselves by occasional glimpses of the towering precipice.

In contrast with that gigantic height, the trees had appeared tiny, actually the smallest I'd noticed before weariness had caused me to lose interest was six feet through, and they soared breathlessly upward for a hundred feet before their boughs sprang outward to form the shimmering canopy of the woods.

They grew far apart and the spaces between them were extraordinarily free of brush for so obviously ancient a forest. We'd seemed to plod endlessly through the aisles of some De Quinceyan dream-cathedral, vast and awesome and unreal.

"I see it, Mumsy. I see what he's looking at." Kay pulled her hand from her mother's, pointed to where a reddish glow wavered briefly on the bark of some arboreal giant. "It's a fire. A camp fire, I betcha."

George stirred, said, low-toned. "You people wait here while I look that over."

"Be careful, Geo—" He strode away, leaving Helen in mid-sentence, looking after him with an odd, almost tender expression on her face. After a minute she turned to me. "He loves his son very much, doesn't he?" The huskiness in her voice was more noticeable than I'd ever heard it except when once or twice she'd talked to me of her dreams for Kay. "Too much to have room for any—anything else in his mind."

"Any one else," I suggested, dryly, "is what you meant to say. It seems so. Well," I yawned, "I'm going to try and get some rest. I'd advise you and Kay to do the same." I let myself awkwardly down to the ground, stretched out, "What time is it, anyway?"

She held her wrist-watch up, turned her hand to catch one of the pallid beams filtering through the whispering foliage overhead. "It's—Oh, dear! It's stopped. I'm sure I wound—" She shook the watch, put it to her ear, looked at it again. Her breath caught. "Kay. I wish you would lie down, sweetheart." Her voice was strangely flat. "See that pile of dried leaves over there. It looks so comfy and soft. Go lie down there."

"You come with me."

"I shall in a little while. I just want to talk to grandpa Harry about something. Go on now."

The little girl obeyed, though with evident reluctance. Helen settled down beside me.

"You have a watch," she murmured, "even if you are too tired to get it out. Please look at it."

"What—? Oh, all right." I dug out my Waltham from the fob pocket my paunch made too tight for comfort.

"What do you know about that? It's stopped too."

"What time does it say it is?"

"A quarter to four."

"Mine says thirteen of. It hasn't stopped. Neither has yours."

I shoved up to a sitting posture.

"That's impossible! It was three-thirty when—Hell!" I burst into a laugh. "You had me dizzy for a second.—It's a quarter-to-four in the morning, of course."

"You know better than that." The moon must have risen because in the flecks of light dancing across the pale oval of her face I could clearly see how drawn it was. "You know as well as I do twelve hours haven't passed since we were in the Barret's kitchen."

"Oh, now—"

"It was twilight when Kay first found herself in that cave, when we arrived there not more than ten minutes later it was full night. The sun doesn't set in April till well after seven." The delicate wings of her nose quivered. "We might as well face it. We're living at a different rate of time than our watches are adjusted to measure."

I stared blankly. "A different rate of time—Sorry, Helen. I was never good at puzzles. Just what do you mean?"

"I'm not sure myself." She spread her hands. "All I know is we've done things that should have taken us three hours or more while our watches were marking off only about fifteen minutes, and that sounds like something I once read in a book by a man named Dunn. 'An Experiment with Time' it was called. I didn't understand it very well, but I do remember that he showed how time must run differently in different regions of Space."

"Poppycock," I snorted. "Balderdash."

"I thought it was too, till I talked about it with Wes—with a young man I know who teaches graduate courses in Science, at N.Y.U. He told me that while Dunn's book is popularized, it's basically sound. Wes tried to explain to me how according to the latest theories Time and Space are all mixed up—'interrelated functions of one another' is the phrase he used. 'Unless modern mathematical physics is all wrong,' he told me, 'if you were suddenly to be translated to some other part of Space, your watch would keep on measuring time as it is here but you would be living at an entirely different rate.'

"I must have looked awfully dumb, because he quit, told me not to worry my head about it, it was just something mathematicians liked to play around with and had no practical application. I—"

"Hold it, Helen!" My skin was prickling. "Let me think." I was back in the living room of that charming small house in Westchester County. I was looking at a book I'd picked at random from a shelf and an old man's gentle murmur was in my ears. "All I've done is to find a practical application of his discovery of the essential identity of Space and Time..."

"No, damn it," I said aloud. "I don't believe it," and abruptly chuckled.

"What's so funny?"

"I just thought of the old story, Helen, about the hillbilly making his first visit to the Zoo. You must have heard it a thousand times. How, he stood in front of the giraffes cage and drawled, 'Shucks. I don't believe it. That ain't no sich animule.' Maybe I'm like that hillbilly, but—"

I didn't finish. George Carson was coming into sight, past a gigantic bole. He was grinning from ear to ear and beside him trotted a sturdy little boy in shorts and sneakers.

Peter. Peter Carson.

9

HE WAS a small-sized replica of George, the same chunky build, the same smiling gray eyes. Those eyes adored his father as by the unsteady illumination of the campfire and two flickering candles he and a curly-haired small girl he'd introduced as Margy brought to the rough wooden table the food for which we'd discovered a ravenous appetite.

Queer food for me to be enjoying. I like onions and French frieds with my steaks, the rest of your vegetables are spinach as far as I'm concerned. This stuff, however, tasted blamed good, even cold. Some sort of cooked grain in a bowl, a slab of something more solid that I could not identify, some peculiarly shaped fruit. "Now if I only had some coffee to wash all this down," I remarked. "I'd feel like Lucullus."

"Try this, sir."

Peter put in front of me a mug rather skilfully carved out of wood. I sniffed the limpid liquid it contained, sipped. It had a tangy, pleasant taste, altogether new to me.

"What is this?"

"Panjusade, we call it. It comes from a tree out there."

The lad gestured vaguely across the clearing.

It was an open space about two acres in extent, near one end of which the bark-covered stakes that formed the long table's legs had been driven into the ground. Along the side of the field to my right a narrow brook purled and beside this two large, rectangular tents cast black shadows in the moonlight. A baseball diamond was marked out on the grassy expanse we faced and beyond this I could just make out the uprights of a basketball standard.

Beside me, on the end of the backless bench where we sat in a row, sprawled a limp-limbed and much mauled doll.

"I hope you have some milk for Kay, Peter," Helen was asking anxiously.

He looked troubled.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Clark, I—We—That is—"

"Oh, it really doesn't matter if she misses it for once. She can make up for it in the morning."

"There won't be any in the morning either," the boy said. "We don't have any cows. Aunt Mary wanted to bring some but Uncle John said no. He thinks that's one of the good things about Tranquillia, that there are no animals here."

"No animals at all?"

"Nor birds either," he nodded as if this were the most natural thing in the world. "There's just the trees and plants in the valley where the woods end and—and that's all."

"The plants and the trees give us all our food," Margy put in. She was a tiny tyke, snip-nosed, most apparently full of life and the devil but she'd waited on us with the grave courtesy of an adult. "And we're finding out how to make clothes out of them, and everything else we need."

"I see." I knew by Helen's expression that she did not see at all, asked the question that was troubling her—and me. "What did this Uncle John of yours mean when he said it's a good thing there are no animals here?"

Peter hesitated an instant before answering. "He explained if there were animals we'd start killing them for food and maybe to protect ourselves from wild Ones, and that would kind of teach us killing living things is sometimes all right, and after a while someone would get the idea, maybe, that it's sometimes right to kill people too, like in wars and such."

George grunted. He stared at his son, his expression at once startled, puzzled and speculative. "This 'Uncle John' is John Barret, Pete?"

"Of course. He and Aunt Mary are the only grownups ever came here till you did."

"And Tranquillia, as you call this place, is a children's camp?"

THE lad shifted from foot to foot, looked uncomfortable. "I guess you might say it is, Lieutenant Carson," Margy answered for him. "There's only us kids live here."

"I'm asking Pete." George kept his level, almost stern gaze on the boy. "All right, son. You've stalled long enough. We're fed and rested, now I want the whole story."

A muscle knotted in Peter's freckled cheek. His mouth opened, closed again.

His eyes were unhappy. "Excuse me," Margy came to his rescue. "Kay looks awful tired. Maybe you'd like me to take her in the girls' tent, Mrs. Clark, and show her where she's to sleep."

"Please do, dear. And thank you for—"

"I don't want to go to sleep," Kay pouted. "I want to stay here and listen to Peter's story."

"I'll tell you all about it in the morning, sweetheart. Up! Upsydaisy! Kiss me good night and off with you."

"Oh, come on, Kay." Margy held out a stubby-fingered, capable little hand. "Wait till you see the cute washroom we've got fixed up in the back of the tent. I tell you what. I'll lend you my best pajamas and my very own bed."

"You mustn't do that, Margy," Helen protested. "Where will you sleep?"

"Oh, I'm not supposed to sleep tonight. You see I'm all dressed." She indicated her halter and shorts. "It's Peter's and my turn to be on watch." I understood now how George had located his son without rousing the camp. "Come along Kay. Don't be such a baby."

That got the brat. As the two ran off, I heard the small hostess warn, "Don't make any noise and wake up the other girls." They vanished inside the farther tent and I turned to hear George saying, "Night watch, eh? So there is something in these woods to be afraid of."

"No, sir. There isn't really but we can't ever make the new kids believe it, so Uncle John thought we ought to have a boy and a girl stay up every night to keep the fire burning and just be around."

"Peter." Helen leaned forward, a curious light in her eyes. "Is it always the same two that stay up together?"

"Why, yes, Ma'am. You see, when you've been on watch you're let off chores and school the next day and everybody's got a special job to do, like cooking or washing up or going in the woods or the fields to get things, so we'd get all mixed up if we did it any other way."

"Mmm. School, you said. Who teaches you?"

"Why, Uncle John of course. And Aunt Mary. One of them's here every day and they teach us all kinds of things, but they make us kids run things ourselves. We've got to learn how, they say, because we won't always have them to depend on."

This had a startling implication. George put it into words.

"You mean this—er—arrangement is permanent?"

The lad's brow knitted.

"Permanent, dad? I—I don't know—I can't answer that."

"You can't—Peter! That's the first time you've ever said anything like that to me."

"Yes, sir." The lad's eyes lifted, met the gray ones so like them. "Yes," he repeated, miserably. "It's the first time. I—I'm sorry dad. I—We've all promised not ever to say anything about Tranquillia. That's why we don't write letters or—or anything, so we won't slip up and give it away. We promised—"

"Peter!" Bronzed hands, clasping the table's edge, flattened fingertips against the wood. "You—"

"George." Helen touched the back of one of those corded hands. "He's a child, George, and I'm sure you've taught him always to keep a promise."

The man swallowed, relaxed a little.

"Listen, Son," he said more quietly. "You know I would never ask you to do anything dishonorable, don't you?"

"No, Dad. I know you wouldn't."

"Well then, you'll believe me when I tell you it's right for you to forget that promise and answer my questions frankly. First. Where, if you know, and what is this place you call Tranquillia?"

"Tranquillia," a new voice said, behind me, "is a different world from that to which you belong." John Barret's low and gentle voice. "It is a world where there is no hate, no strife and God willing shall never be, a clean, new world where a new race shall live in friendship and peace forever."

I turned and saw him standing there, the moonlight in his silken, silvery hair.

10

GEORGE CARSON was on his feet, head and shoulders taller than John Barret but instead of the wrath I expected in his eyes there was a question, and wild surmise. "A new world," he repeated, slowly, tasting the words. "Friendship. Peace forever. Do you mean all that, old man? Literally?"

"I mean exactly that, Lieutenant Carson."

Helen was up too. She was trembling. With excitement, not fear. "Of course he does, George. I've known it ever since Peter said what he did about there being no animals here."

"I was afraid to let myself hope—God!" It wasn't an expletive, it was almost a prayer. "I'm still afraid to let myself believe—"

"Look," I growled. "I don't like to break up this love fest, but I'd like you birds to tell me how you expect to keep this Shangri-La a secret?" I was beginning to understand, or so I thought. "Sooner or later some plane's going to wing over that cliff. The country its pilot belongs to will claim it, and some other nation will dispute that claim and—phtt—there goes your peace." Barret's machine somehow had transported us; in no time flat, to—well, perhaps an unexplored region of Antarctica kept incongruously temperate by some whim of sun and air currents. "The Earth's shrunk to a pretty small ball, you know, since the Wright brothers taught us to fly."

"Indeed it has," Barret agreed. "Indeed it has, Mr. Gatlin, a ball far too small for the good of those who inhabit it. But this is not the Earth."

"Come again."

"At least not the Earth you're thinking of," he placidly continued. "Tranquillia, my friend, is a planet in another Space, another Time, than Terra."

"Look you!" I jabbed a forefinger at him. "Helen was trying to tell me something like that a-while back and I'll say to you what I said to her. 'There ain't no sich animule.'"

"Oh, you're wonderful!" Her laugh had the very note and texture of the brook's liquid tinkle. "But you're too good a newspaperman to really mean it. Seeing is believing."

"So they say, but what do I see here to make me believe your fairy tale?" I waved an embracing arm. "Grass. Trees no more different from those we rode through this afternoon than those are from the ones that grew in Westchester when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. The same moon. The—Uh!" My jaw dropped. "Say! What was in that Panjusade anyway? I can swear I see two moons."

I pulled the edge of my hand across my eyes, looked again. They were still there a reddish crescent just rising above the forest, another hanging golden and almost full above the black line of the colossal precipice.

Barret chuckled. "Tranquillia has two moons, Mr. Gatlin. Hardly a matter for astonishment since Uranus, in our own Solar System, boasts four and Saturn ten."

Microscopic needles were again pricking my skin. I moistened my lips. "Okay. I'm licked. This isn't the Earth. But how in the name of reason—? Listen. Unless you've a straitjacket handy, you'd better tell me how you got us here. And quick."

He smiled that slow, sweet smile of his.

"That is not easy, to one as unacquainted with the latest physico-mathematical concepts as you've confessed yourself to be. May I suggest that we move to my classroom; that grassy knoll; and make ourselves comfortable while I attempt it—Oh, Peter!"

The lad had been standing silently by through all this.

"I think perhaps you can be excused from watch for the rest of the night."

"But Uncle John—!"

"I know—you haven't seen your father so long. To please me, Peter?"

"I'll see you in the morning, Dad." He ran off. I saw George wince at that as I let myself down in the spot Barret had indicated and leaned my back against a tree that overhung the knoll, but Helen whispered something in his ear and he smiled, stretched out on the grass. The girl settled beside him, I noticed again how like a bird alighting she did so.

Barret lowered himself, sat facing the three of us.

"Space, Mr. Gatlin," he began, "is neither finite nor infinite—I beg your pardon." He smiled apologetically. "Let me put it this way. Space is neither limited nor limitless." Already he was beyond my depth but George was nodding wisely and Helen looked as if she understood, so I thought I'd better keep quiet. "It curves in upon itself much as does the shell of an egg, except that the eggshell has an inside and an outside and Space has not. Is that clear?"

"All but that last remark," I bluffed. "How can anything not have an inside and an outside?"

"Well, since it is not important for our present purpose, suppose we forget it. Let us just think of the Universe, everything that is and the reaches between, as our empty eggshell with, say, a hole at one end but otherwise unpunctured. An eggshell whose greatest circumference is approximately a billion light years.

"Let us further assume that at the other end of our eggshell from the hole, there are two specks of dirt, one on the inner surface, one on the outer, separated only by the thickness of the shell. Imagine that a—a bacterium wishes to go from one speck to the other. It would have to go all along the shell's surface to the hole at the farther end, through the hole and all the way back to the second speck, would it not?"

"If it couldn't go through the shell."

"Precisely. If it could find a way to penetrate the shell, it would shorten that journey of a billion light years to the infinitesimal part of a second." Barret was triumphant. "And that is all there is to it. Earth is one speck, Tranquillia the other and I am the bacterium who has invented a method of warping Space to shortcut that billion light years' trip. There. It wasn't so hard to understand after all, was it?"

"No." I was still almost completely befuddled, but I didn't intend to admit it. "It's as simple as figuring out why a gal who not so many hours ago told a man he was despicable should now be twining a strand of his hair around her forefinger."

"Oh!" Helen snatched her hand away. "I hate you!"

"Don't blame me, honey. It must be the effect of double moonlight."

"If that's it," George grunted, rolling over, "blessed be the two moons of Tranquillia." Propping himself on his elbows he looked fatuously down into her face. "Say, Pop. Did you ever notice she's slightly cross-eyed?"

"I am not! It's just that I'm focussing a smudge at the tip of your nose." Helen sat up. "Mr. Barret. You—How did you know, before you came through the first time, that you'd find yourself on another world this side of Space?"

"Suppose," she caught her breath. "Suppose you'd come out in—in just empty nothingness?"

"I should never have returned," he replied, tranquilly. "There were also the possibilities of my—shall I say materializing, for lack of a better word—on a blazing Sun or on an uninhabitable as well as uninhabited world, or within a planet's rocky or lava-like interior."

"But you tried it anyway?"

"Wouldn't you have?" he asked, as though she could answer in only one way. Talk about your Columbus! Cristoforo at least knew that if he failed he'd drown or starve, or die in some other comparatively comfortable and approved manner. "However, in order that no one should follow me if I met with disaster, I took care to destroy all my notes on the construction of my machine, as you've called it, and instructed my wife to completely destroy it if I did not reappear within a certain short space of time."

"How could she?" George pulled himself up. "The machine wouldn't have been there for her to destroy."

Barret's eyes twinkled. "Strangely enough, Lieutenant, it would have been. It is there now."

"You sent it back!"

"No. It is still in the cavern where I wakened to find myself alone, and guessed where you'd gone, but it is also in my home in Westchester."

"Bunk," I snorted. "You had me on the ropes for a while, but you've got another guess coming if you think you can get me to believe anything can be two places at once."

"I'm not trying to." I had a suspicion he was covertly laughing at me. "My machine is in only one place, but that place happens to be common to both worlds, just as the point where the circumferences of two tangent circles meet is common to both."

"I give up." It wasn't he that had me defeated, it was those two moons riding gloriously in a sky of stars that, were not the stars one sees from Earth. "You bet your life against the quadrillion to one parlay that Earth and some other planet would touch each other in that room off your kitchen."

"The odds were not quite as much against me as that. Tangent circles, may I remind you, or spheroids, may lie within one another. I have not as yet collated enough data to demonstrate it mathematically, but I'm inclined to believe that Tranquillia and Terra are in some part co-extensive—"

"Lay off," I begged. "Please lay off me before I start looking for paper dolls to cut out." I pressed my throbbing head. "All I want to know is how soon I get back to New York."

John Barret plucked a grass-blade, regarded it contemplatively. "That, Mr. Gatlin, is a problem. I have been wondering whether I can permit you to return at all."

11

"EASY, Pop." George grabbed my arm. "Hold your fire."

"Hold nothing," I grated. "If he thinks he—"

"Please." Helen was clinging to me. "Please calm down and let him explain."

"I don't seem to have a chance to do anything else, the way you're hanging on to me, but don't get the idea he's going to hypnotize me the way he has you two. I'm going back, or I'll know the reason why."

"Precisely what I should like to tell you," John Barret murmured in that mild way he had. "If you will permit me."

"Go on. But you'd better make it good."

He did.

On his second visit here, he told us, he had explored this new world, had found that while its gravity, atmosphere, temperature range and other climatic conditions were fairly identical with those of Earth, no life existed anywhere on it that he could discover.

There were only the trees and the plants, the fragrant breeze and a deep, unbroken tranquillity.

He had returned to a world torn by war, a world of organized killing, of shattered cities and enslaved nations, even his own beloved Science prostituted to the uses of brutality.

"I proposed to Mary," he continued, "that we pass through and smash the machine so that we could not be followed, and live out what little time was left to us, quietly in this quiet forest. She made me see how wrong this was. She made me understand that God could not mean the gift a new and unspoiled world for us alone. Yes." He looked up at some sound in my throat. "Yes, I believe in Him. The more I have learned of the infinite, yet ordered complexity of His Universe, the more firmly convinced I have been that only He could have built it."

The plan they settled on was very simple, almost naive. They would take to Tranquillia a group of children old enough to adapt quickly to new conditions, not yet old enough to unlearn the ways of the sorry world they were leaving. "If we could have brought here all the children of Earth," he sighed, "it would have satisfied us better, but that of course was impossible. We decided that a dozen boys and girls were enough to be the progenitors of a new race whose religion, implanted from its very birth will be the holiness of neighborliness, the sanctity of human life."

Helen's hand had crept into George's. In the soft glow of Tranquillia's moons their faces were calm and peaceful. I recalled how dark and bitter those faces had been on the Sawmill River Road. I remembered George's despairing cry, "We're trapped. We're trapped without hope of escape."

But Barret was still talking. "I think it was I who thought of how to accomplish our plan with the least danger of interference. I recalled a story a member of our Local Draft Board had told at the village store, how they'd had to turn down, because he had two children, a widower who had been most anxious to get into the army. We placed the first advertisement in the Globe the next day. You know how it read."

"Yes," I observed, dryly. "I know how it read. It was a smart scheme. You could insist on the children you took having no one interested in them except their fathers, and since they were going into combat, you could be pretty certain of not being caught up with till the war's over. But what's going to happen then? What about those fathers when they come back?"

His face went bleak and for a moment there was a spark of fanatic fire in his eyes. "Some will not return. Those who do—will find an empty cottage and a heap of twisted, unanalysable metal in a lead-sheathed room."

"Good Lord, man!" I was appalled. "You can't do that to them!"

"Why not?" This was George. "When you think of the millions of fathers and mothers who have given their children to war, why is it so terrible that a dozen should give theirs to peace?"

"Because—Look here! You were throwing conniption fits in my office this noon because you merely suspected something phoney had happened to Peter. Suppose you'd found that house in Westchester empty when we'd got there? No sign of him, no sign of the people you'd left him with. No trace of any of them, ever. How would you have felt?"

"What difference would that make? Pete would be here, wouldn't he? He won't have to live in the world as it's going to be like when this thing's over. He won't have to face the misery that's ahead. He won't ever have to see everything he's dreamed of and hoped for and worked to help build smashed because of some megalomaniac's lust for power. Isn't that worth whatever I would have had to go through?"

"You can say that because you know you won't have to go through it. Helen. You're with me, aren't you?"

Her hands twisted in her lap and a pulse throbbed in the shadowed hollow beneath her throat. "I—I'm sorry for those fathers, dreadfully sorry, but I think George is right. You—If you had a child, you'd understand. If you'd lain awake night after night, listening to her breathe while you stared burning-eyed into the black future, trying so hard, so desperately hard, to see one single, tiny ray of hope for her happiness."

"Well, maybe I'm wrong." I might be, as far as what I'd been saying went, but there was still something askew about this set-up. Something—I couldn't put salt on its tail, couldn't get it out to the forepart of my brain. "So what?" I settled down again. "What does it all add up to? I seem to remember your setting out, Mr. Barret, to explain to me why you're wondering whether you ought to let us go back where we came from."

"Isn't that obvious, Mr. Gatlin?" It was, naturally, but I wanted to hear him say it. "If you return, Tranquillia is no longer safe from incursion. The one man who has any inkling of the theory of my machine will never reveal it, but there are other physicists less scrupulous who can reconstruct it, once they know it has been done."

"And use it, knowing it's safe to do so. Yes."

"On the other hand, as you've demonstrated a few minutes ago, the habit of violence is so deeply ingrained in you that if you remain here you must become a focus of infection that will imperil all I hope to accomplish."

"You're damned if you do, eh, and you're damned if you don't."

"No. There is one way between the horns of the dilemma. You earnestly desire to go back to Earth, do you not?"

"What do you think?"

"I think that you are a man of honor, Mr. Gatlin. Therefore, you shall return provided you give me your solemn promise that you will keep the existence of Tranquillia, and all you have learned about it, secret forever."

Now wasn't that a proposition to put to a man who cut his eyeteeth on a Hoe press? The biggest story since the Chinese invented printing, and I should promise to bury it. "Suppose the answer is no, Mr. John Barret? How are you going to keep us from walking back to that cave and pushing the button on that infernal machine of yours?" I shoved erect. "If you want your Tranquillia to see a first rate exhibition of violence, you'll try it."

He looked up at me, soberly, but apparently unperturbed. "I don't have to. You may press that button from now till the end of time and you will still be in the cavern."

That was what I wanted to know. The reason it hadn't worked before wasn't because of power failure from the other side, or because he'd jarred something out of kilter when he fell. "So there's a switch you've got to throw to reverse it, is there? Where is it?"

Would my stratagem work? His wife wasn't here to keep him from an absentminded slip. "There is no switch," he smiled. "The machine will not operate unless it is shielded with lead, and the only material it will not bring through the Space-warp is lead. That is why Mary and I have never visited Tranquillia together, one of us has to remain in that lead-lined room, protected by a lead-lined costume, to bring the other back."

That was that—Maybe not. "What does she do? Stay in there and keep her thumb on the button till you show up?"

"Hardly. As long as one of us is absent, the other visits the room every hour, exactly on the hour, and waits five minutes for a signal that can be given by moving a certain rod in a certain way." Oh, oh. That "certain" was the tip-off he was on to me.

"We've agreed that if that signal does not come within twelve Earth-hours, which is a far longer period on Tranquillia, the other will come through."

"And then neither of you goes back."

"No one goes back," he agreed. "Unless someone on Earth happens to come along and pushes that button."

HE shook his head. "No. The first thing we shall do is destroy the machine."

He rose, made a weary, almost sorrowful gesture with his hands.

"But all that is aside from the issue. The point is that you cannot return to Earth unless and until I give Mary our signal while you are within three feet of the machine. I think you know that you cannot make me give her that signal against my will."

"Yes." About him, standing there, there was the awful strength of the gentle, the same strength I'd recognized in Pastor Niemoller as I'd watched him in his pulpit while the iron-jawed Storm Troopers thudded down the aisle of his Church. "Yes, I know," I admitted defeat, "that I'll stay here forever unless I give you the promise you ask, and I don't want to stay here. On my word of honor, John Barret, I will never tell anyone how I got here, or what I've seen here, or even that there is such a place as here."

"Thank you." He was very still for a long moment and I could see the tautness he'd not betrayed till now drain out of him. Then he turned to George and Helen, who'd also risen but still held hands as they stood waiting for his, "And you? Will you two promise to keep the secret of Tranquillia?"

They hadn't spoken, either of them, since Helen had made that speech about lying awake at night. I should have heard them if they had. They didn't speak to one another now.

"No," George answered the old man, very firmly. "No. We do not."

To my surprise, Barret's lined, gray countenance lit up.

"You wish to remain here?"

"We wish to remain here," George replied. "In Tranquillia. With our son and daughter—and with each other."

"And with each other," Helen echoed him, her eyes shining.

12

I INSISTED on leaving at once and John Barret, anxious to reassure his wife that he'd recovered from his heart attack, was as eager. We started immediately but by the time we reached the cave mouth the sun—a sun of another Galaxy so far from ours that the human mind cannot begin to grasp the immensity of the distance—was rising.

I turned and took a last look at the green sea of foliage that from this height was all that could be described of Tranquillia.

Even the gentle breeze that had greeted us here had died down, so that the thin thread of smoke from the children's campfire rose straight upward to the pellucid sky. Somehow it symbolized the spirit of peaceful aspiration they had brought here.

"Well," I said soberly. "I hope it all works out the way you think it will."

"It must," Helen cried. "It has to." The two of them had come along, to say good-by to me on the borderline between their new world and the one to which I am returning. "God can't be giving us a second chance just to have us fail again."

Barret had gone on into the cavern and this gave George the chance he evidently had been waiting for. "Still time to change your mind, Pop." He put a hand on my shoulder. "I'm sure we can talk the old man into letting you stay."

"Nothing doing. You can have your Tranquillia." I pulled away, started into that great hole hollowed out of the unimaginable cliff. "Me. I'm going back where I belong." I didn't want them to see my face just then. "Where I belong," I repeated. "Back to my own kind of people, the kind that can take it without running away."

The light followed us in, dimming but still strong enough to show me the thread from Helen's sweater as it trailed across the rocky floor. It unaccountably had frayed during the few hours since she'd unravelled it. Or was it my eyes that made it appear so fuzzy? My eyes. Barret's frail, white-haired frame, ahead, was just as fuzzy.

Helen's heel-clicks, catching up to me, were caught up and multiplied by some reflecting surface. George was on the other side of me, his foot-falls thudding. "Funny," I mused aloud, "the kind of things come popping into the head of an old fool like me, things that have nothing to do with what's happening at the time. Like just now I happened to think of something happened on the old World.

"Ibis was a long time ago. I guess you kids are just about old enough to remember its last days, but this was long before that.

"John—Well, call him John Burns—was hell and gone the most promising cub we'd ever had, but one day he gets the pink slip in the pay envelope. Orders from the Big Boss who'd just happened to drop in for a day or two, like he used to about once a year.

"John don't get it. He don't get it at all so he barges right into Pulitzer's sanctum, demanding to know why he's fired. 'Haven't I been turning in the best copy on your sheet?' he asked. 'Didn't I do a whale of a yam just yesterday on that waterfront riot?'

"'You did,', Pulitzer acknowledges, looking at him, the way he had, like he could see him with his blind eyes. 'A humdinger of a story.'

"'And didn't we beat every other rag in town by an edition because I was right on top of it when it started?'

"'That's it,' the Boss says. 'That's why you're being fired.' John stares at him, not believing his ears. 'Weren't you supposed to be in the Hall of Records,' Pulitzer goes on, 'copying off the real estate assessment list?'

"'Sure. Sure I was, but that's just a lousy grind anybody knows his a-b-c's can do. I got this hunch maybe something was brewing over on West Street and tipped a clerk a couple of bucks to take it off my hands. What's the matter? He get it bolluxed up?'

"'No. No, he did a good job. The only thing is, it was your job he did, the job your editor sent you out to do. Good-by, my boy. I wish you luck.'"

GORGE'S footfalls thudded along on one side of me, Helen's heels clicked on the other. Not far, now, John Barret's machine glittered in a beam of sunshine that slanted down across the gloom from some chink in the cave's front wall.

"And then," I rambled on, "There was something Roosevelt said in a speech once. I don't remember it word for word, but it was something about how we're fighting not just for America nor just for the United Nations, but to make a better world for all the little people of all the world. I don't remember if he used just those words, 'the little people' and I know that if he did he certainly wasn't thinking just about the children, but I am. I'm thinking about all the millions of kids who're going to have to keep on living in that world because their fathers weren't lucky enough to answer John Barret's ad—But here he is, looking at his watch impatiently. How about it, Barret? How much time have I left to say good-by to my friends?"

"Less than a minute—Watch that line on the floor, Helen!" he cautioned. "George. If you're caught inside of it, you'll go with us."

I stepped over the faint scratch in the rock that marked out the boundaries of the lead-sheathed room in another world. "Well, my boy, I guess this is it. I—What's the matter, Son? What do you see on your arm?"

Putting out his hand to grasp the one I'd extended, he'd brought his sleeve into the sunbeam. The gold stripes above its cuff flashed in the light and he was staring down at them as if he'd never seen them before. "George! I'm saying good-by."

His fingers crushed mine, and then I was looking at Helen. "Good-by, Helen."

"Good-by," she whispered. It was the tears between her lashes that the sun made brilliant. "I—Oh, good-by!"

I wanted to wish them luck but I was all choked up and before I could get it out Barret snapped, "Move toward me, Mr. Gatlin." He was doing something to the machine. There was a thud beside me. Something butted my shoulder—That infernal vibration! The blackness smashed down.

I was dazzled by light, the bluish-white light of a fluorescent double-tube. I was blinking at a grotesque apparition, hooded, shapeless in a cloak of some heavy-seeming material, thick-gloved hand dropping from the pushbutton—

And behind me, as I turned to look for the lead-lined door from this room, was George Carson!

"You win, Pop!" He was trying to grin, but he was making a poor job of it. "I can't do it. I can't run out on those millions of kids who've got to keep on living on this lousy Earth of ours. I'm going to finish up the assignment I'm on and if I live through it, I'm going on to do my share in making it a better world—"

"And I'm going to do my best to help you, darling." Helen stepped around from behind the machine. "It's going to take all of us, it's going to take every drop of will and energy and brains we've got, but we'll do it, you and I and Pop, and millions of others like us. We will, George. We will in the end build a bright, new world here on Earth for our children—" She broke off, her eyes widening, the exaltation draining from them. "Our children," she whispered. "Oh, George! Kay, Peter..."

A MUSCLE knotted in his gaunt cheek—"Kay and Peter will be in our care," a low, musical voice came from behind me, "and in the care of Him who sets different paths for each of us to follow." Mary Barret had let the lead impregnated heavy folds fall to her feet, had removed the goggled mask, "Paths that may be wearily long but that all come together at last." Her frail hand clasped her husband's and standing there like that they seemed more ethereal than ever, more—non-Earthly.

"If you will step out for a moment," John Barret asked, smiling that vague, endearing smile of his. "Mr. Gatlin. Mrs. Clark. Lieutenant Carson. I should like a word with my wife."

There was a light in the kitchen, and the gay curtains were blowing in at the open window. "It's still night here," Helen exclaimed, then remembered. "Of course—What time is it, George?"

He looked at his watch. "Nine. Nine-seven. I've still time to get back to my ship by midnight. But you—"

"I'll be waiting," Helen told him. "I'll be waiting for you—You know that, don't you?"

"I think—I'm sure I can get leave for another twenty-four hours in a week or so. Pop!" He came around to me. "I'm going to depend on you to make arrangements for—"

The floor was vibrating, the sensation like that of a massage machine against the soles of my shoes.

It ended.

Barret's keys were still in the lock, turned in my hand. The light from the kitchen struck into the lead-lined cubicle. It laid my shadow over the ungainly folds of a cloak on the floor, over a goggled hood. Except for this and John Barret's machine, the little room was empty.

I felt George and Helen press against my back, felt their breaths on my cheek. A metallic clang half-deafened me. A fragment of shining metal thudded to the floor, another. The clangor filled the little house in Westchester and bit by bit we watched the thing John Barret built disintegrate under the blows of a sledge hammer wielded on a world a billion light years away.

And the clangor ended, and there was nothing in that room but a heap of smashed, unreconstructible metal. "Good luck," I called into that empty room. "The best of luck for your dreams, John Barret, under the two moons of Tranquillia."

Me, I can dream better under the one moon I've been used to all my life.

_____________________

10: No Escape from Destiny

Startling Stories, May 1948

1: New Projector

THE room was like a tomb. There were only the gray walls, the gray floor and ceiling.

There was only the rasp of my irate breathing as I stood with my back against the locked door, waiting for something unguessable to happen.

The melodramatic mystery with which Malvin Parker surrounds his demonstration of each new invention has irritated me ever since the fall midnight in 1952. This was when he locked the door of the cubbyhole we shared at Tech U., produced what seemed to be an ordinary dinner plate somewhat dirtier than the hundreds we washed every day in the Commons' steamy kitchen and with no other tool but his fingernails, stripped a thin film from it to display it clean and sparkling as if it had just come from the tubs.

That was the first piece ever made of the laminated tableware that has emancipated the world's housewives from the postprandial sink. On that plate, and a hundred-odd other products of Parker's fecund brain, were founded the vast Loring Enterprises and my own not inconsiderable fortune. The best piece of business I've ever done was to sign him up, that very night, to the contract by which I engaged to support him and his dependents for fife in exchange for a blanket assignment of all his past and future patents.

Best for Dr. Malvin Parker as well as for me. Were it not for Billingsley Loring's genius at industrial promotion, Parker would be just another crackpot inventor wearing out chairs in one office anteroom after another.

Yes, for well over a quarter-century I've found it profitable to humor his whims and so when he challenged me to make it impossible for anyone to enter this room in his laboratory-dwelling, I proceeded to do so without asking the questions I knew he'd refuse to answer.

There were no windows, of course, and the ventilating outlets were screened with fine wire mesh welded in place. I had my men strip the chamber to its structural plasticrete and spray all its surfaces with transparent Loring Instant-Dry Quikenam. The single door was fitted with another of Parker's devices, a phonolock which I myself set to a keyword I confided to no one. It opened inward, moreover, so that with my back planted against it, no one could enter without pushing me aside.

In the harsh glare of the cold-light strip edging the ceiling, the uniform grayness robbed the room of shape and dimension. It was an illimitable, terrifying vastness. It closed in on me so tightly I could not move, could scarcely breathe. If only there were some detail; even only a shadow for my eyes to seize upon. If only there were some sound—

There was sound, a sourceless drone barely audible. There was a shadow; the shadow of a shadow so tenuous I could not make out if it was right on top of me, on the opposite wall or in between.

Malvin Parker stood in the center of the room! He couldn't possibly have gotten in here. He was here, undeniably, his great grizzled head hunched forward on the habitually bowed shoulders of his bearlike hulk, a triumphant smile flickering in the deep-sunk dark pools of his eyes. He—The answer came to me. "Oh, no, Mal Parker. You can't fool with a tri-dimensional video image of yourself."

"I suppose not," his projected voice sighed but on his pictured face that smile of his deepened. "I wouldn't try."

The apparition stepped forward, grabbed my forearm with gnarled and very tangible fingers.

"Does that feel like a video image?"

"Urggh!" I jerked loose, butted him with my shoulder, so hard that despite his greater height and weight he staggered side-ward. My throat clamped as I goggled at a brown flurry of lab coat, at a leg and foot—

The rest of Malvin Parker had vanished!

He at once reappeared, looking a little scared.

"You shouldn't have done that, Billiken." That nickname, underlying my shortness and rotundity, was like it slap in my face and he knew it. "You might have electrocuted me."

"Electrocuted! With what? There's nothing but empty space here."

"Right, Billiken. But there are plenty of bare high voltage leads where I am."

"Where are you?" I gagged. He had appeared in a room it was utterly impossible to enter, he'd proved to me that he was indubitably here, now he told me he was somewhere else. "Where the devil are you?"

"In my electronics laboratory, a floor above you. What you're gaping at is—well, you might call it a material image."

"I might," I flung back, hoarsely. "But I don't know why. It sounds like gobbledygook to me."

He chuckled again, enjoying my discomfiture. "Look, Billiken. You're familiar with the principles of tele—" He broke off, looked to the right at something I could not see, or at someone! For he was saying, "Just a moment, dear. I'm talking with Bill Loring," and I knew who it was. Only two persons could have brought that tender affection to his seamed countenance. One of them, his wife Neva, died eight years ago.

"I don't see why not," he responded to a voice I could not hear, and turned back to me. "That irreverent daughter of mine suggests that we continue our discussion over drinks in her sitting room. What do you say?"

I said it was a good idea, and meant it whole-souledly. I wanted desperately to get out of this blasted room where I talked with a man who insisted he wasn't there.

"Very well." He nodded. "We'll meet you there."

He disappeared again. For good.

The room was just as it had been when I locked myself into it, the ventilator screens unbroken, the paint film unmarred. Unless I'd been hypnotized by the droning sound, which had now cut off. The door that swung open as I spoke the keyword was opening for the first time since I'd closed myself in here alone.

But my biceps still ached from the grip of Malvin Parker's fingers, digging in.

Better than he could suspect, I knew the way to the jewelcase-like boudoir Neva designed to set off her fragile, almost ethereal beauty. My breath caught in a sudden poignant twinge of recollection as Sherry Parker smiled at me from the chair where she presided over a gleaming Autobar. She was her mother at twenty all over again; the same cameo features, the same glowing, amber hair, the same golden skin.

"Uncle Billiken!" she exclaimed. "You're an old meanie staying away from me for months."

"Now, now, my dear," I chuckled indulgently. "You haven't missed me an iota. Not," I cocked, an eyebrow at the two youths who hovered over her, "with so much pleasanter companions than an old codger like me."

"Oh these!" She pouted prettily. "These are just Dad's assistants. Robin Adlair." The burly, fair-haired chap to whom she gestured grinned down at me. "And Bart Murtry."

"This is an honor, Mr. Loring." Murtry was only slightly taller than myself, narrow-faced, his hair black as Sheol, his black eyes sultry. "You've been my inspiration ever since I read Lorne Randall's 'Colossus of Commerce' as a kid. That's a great book, sir, about a great man."

"Yes, the book's a good job." It ought to be. I'd paid Randall plenty to write it. "Nice to have you with the organization, Mr. Murtry." I turned back to Sherry. "May I have a Martini, my dear? No bitters."

Sherry smiled and nodded at me.

"And no olive. I haven't forgotten, Uncle Billiken." Somehow I didn't mind her calling me that, perhaps because it reminded me how Neva and I used to laugh, in this very room, over what her baby tongue made of Billingsley. "By the way, Dad asked me to tell you that he'll be right in. He stopped to make some notes."

Her slim fingers twirled dials atop the sculptured silver chest that sat on a low table before her and it started to whirr softly.

"You know, Mr. Loring," Murtry said. "That Autobar epitomizes for me the difference between you and Dr. Parker. He invented the mechanism that concocts any beverage you set the dials to and delivers it in precisely the right glass at precisely the right temperature, but what did he have when he was through? An ugly and expensive contrivance whose sale would have been limited to a few hotels and restaurants.

"It took you to have casings designed for it that blend with any decor and engineering techniques that brought its cost within the budget of the average family. And then you had your advertising and public relations staff put on a campaign that made it something without which no home could be considered well-appointed. You transformed the demand for it from a few thousands to millions."

"That's right, my boy. That's the story."

"But not all of it, Bart," the blond Adlair drawled, his high-cheekboned, blunt-jawed face naive to my quick glance. "Billingsley Loring didn't take any risk in exploiting the demand he created. What he did, as he always does with new and untried products, was to turn over the Autobar patent to a corporation set up for the purpose and which, while he still held control, contracted with Loring Enterprises to manufacture the contraption on a cost-plus basis and to sell it as sole agent. If it had been a failure the loss would have been the Autobar Company's stockholders'. Since it succeeded, the major portion of the profits go to Loring Enterprises. To Billingsley Loring."

"What's wrong with that?" Murtry demanded.

"Did I say anything was wrong with it?" Adlair spread big hands almost as acid-stained as Parker's, blue eyes innocent. "I merely mentioned it because Lorne Randall left it out of the chapter in his book from which you cribbed what you've just said."

"Cribbed!" White spots pitted the wing-tips of the other youth's nostrils. "Why you rat!"

"Bart!" Sherry exclaimed, a warning note in her voice. And then, "It's time for the Comedy Players, Bart. Turn them on for me, like a good boy. Please."

2: Industrial Giant

NOW there, I thought, as he went across the room, is a young man who might be more useful to me than puttering his time away in a laboratory. He thumbed a switch. On the wall an oblong brightened, took on depth and perspective. The scene was a moonlit garden filled with soft music from an unseen orchestra.

Quarter lifesize but otherwise convincingly real-seeming, a girl in a diaphanous evening dress strolled into it, a tuxedoed youth close behind. I didn't hear what they were saying because Malvin Parker entered just then and came toward me.

"About time you showed up," I growled. "Do you think I've got nothing to do but stand around waiting for you?"

"Sorry." He didn't sound it. "I was delayed. Thank you." He took the filled wineglass Adlair had brought to him. "Port, eh? Just what I need." The blond chap handed me my cocktail. "Robin," Parker said, "is my good right hand, Billiken."

"So I rather imagined." Seeing the two together, I realized how much alike they were. Not physically, except for their height, but in another, more significant way. I didn't like this Adlair. "What about the monkey business you pulled in that room, Mal? How did you get in and out of it?"

"I told you that I wasn't in it, except in somewhat the same sense Lilli Denton and Storm Rand," he gestured to the screen, "are in this one."

"Oh, come now. Those images look and sound real enough but if I went over there and tried to touch them, I'd feel only the wall. Back there I not only heard and saw you. I felt you."

Parker's taunting smile was back in his eyes. "No, Billiken. You did not feel me. Look. The images you see on that video screen are complexes of colored light produced, in the apparatus behind it. They are so modulated by impulses broadcast from a studio a thousand miles away, as to affect your retina in the same way it would be by light reflected directly from the persons and objects depicted. What you hear is sound produced in that same apparatus and similarly modulated to affect your ears in the same way as sounds produced in that studio."

"Thanks for the lecture on video," I snapped. "But what's it got to do with the subject?"

"The principle is the same."

"The devil it is. Light is energy. The electromagnetic force actuating the loudspeaker is energy. You can modulate energy by energy transmitted from a remote source so as to give me the illusion of seeing and hearing objects located at that source. You can't give me the illusion of feeling something I don't actually touch."

Parker's grizzled eyebrows arched quizzically.

"Why not?"

"Because I can't feel energy." Adlair, I noticed, had gone back to the girl. They were laughing together at some banter from the screen and Murtry, beside me, watched them with smoldering eyes. "I can feel only something material and you can't create matter, much less modulate it from a distance to seem what it is not."

"No? Remember the mole you used to have on your cheek, Billiken?"

I remembered it. I remembered how it had bothered Neva. "What about it?"

"You had it removed by what's called knifeless surgery. Nothing material touched your flesh: High-frequency waves, pure energy, sliced away a bit of your bodily tissue as efficiently as the most material of steel scalpels could have. Is there any reason energy in some such form might not affect other bits of tissue in ways similar to that in which they are affected by matter?"

I couldn't think of any. I had to admit so, grudgingly.

"Now," Parker smiled, "when you say you 'feel' an object, you really mean that certain specialized bits of your bodily tissue, the nerve endings in your skin, are affected in ways your brain learned in early infancy to mean that they are in contact with matter having certain physical properties; hardness, form, texture, temperature which sum up to a certain mental concept—the object in question. If those same nerve endings are affected in precisely the same way by, say, some form of energy, would that not mean to your brain that they are in contact with that same object?"

"Well, probably."

"And if at the same time you seemed to see and hear that object the illusion would be complete, would it not? The illusion, for instance, that I was actually, physically present in a room I could not possibly enter."

So the apparition with which I'd wrestled had been as unreal, as insubstantial as the boy and girl locked in closed embrace on the video screen across the room.

"From apparatus on the other side of the wall," Parker explained, "which was permeable to the range of frequencies I used, I projected a tri-dimensional video image of myself plus a complex of energies that affected your sensory-nerve endings as the surfaces of my body and its clothing would have. Your own brain did the rest."

"It certainly did. I could have sworn—Hold it," I interrupted myself. "How could I throw an—an illusion around?" I'd recalled how I'd flung him from me, how all of him but his leg had vanished. "How could I almost electrocute an image?"

"Not you, Billiken. It was your image that came within an ace of throwing me against a live busbar in my lab above you. Your see, I had a transmitter scanning you too so that I could watch your reactions." His eye-corners crinkled with puckish amusement. "You should have seen the expression on your face when I suddenly appeared to you."

"It must have been very funny." The Martini I sipped was acrid. Sherry must have put in the bitters after all. "That's a neat gadget you've trumped up, Mal." I made myself sound admiring. "One of the neatest you've ever produced." And then I let him have it. "But what good is it?"

He stared at me as if I'd spoken in some unintelligible language. "What good?"

"Precisely. What are its commercial possibilities? How can I make a profit out of it?"

"Why, I don't know," Parker stammered, his eyes satisfactorily miserable. "I—Well, it was a challenging problem and I worked it out."

"On my time and at my expense. So suppose you get busy now and work out something this cute trick of yours can do that people will pay money for. Some practical use it can be put to that isn't already being served by conventional video."

He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at his daughter and on his seamed countenance was the almost pleading expression that used to be there when he'd look at his wife as I dressed him down. Neva would laugh a little and then tell him that even if he didn't owe it to me to be practical, he did to her. Sherry's velvet-red lips parted but before she could speak, Bart Murtry forestalled her.

"May I make a suggestion, Mr. Loring?"

"Of course, my boy. The Loring organization's all one big, happy family. Nothing pleases me more than if one of my—er—children, so to speak, comes up with a good, workable idea."

Robin Adlair had decided to take an interest, was coming toward us. "What you said just now," Murtry continued, "reminded me that video is not a perfect advertising medium. It can only tell its audience about a product and show them what it looks like. With this new invention you can permit people actually to handle things—woman's hats, for instance." The black eyes were glowing. "Let the average woman try a becoming hat on and she won't be able to resist buying it. The same for dresses. And as for men—they could actually shave with the razor blade you want to sell them, write with a new kind of fountain pen, even try out the controls of a helicopter or roadcar. The possibilities are limitless."

"Very good, my boy. Excellent. I can see our prospectus now. The Loring—er—Teleseler puts your product into the nation's homes!"

"Bunk."

I wheeled to Adlair, from whom the interruption had come. "You insolent young whippersnapper! How dare you call anything I say bunk?"

"Because that's what it is," he drawled, grinning at me. "You can't put anyone's product into even one home till you've got a receiver there. Who's going to fill a room with apparatus just so they can try on hats or shave with razors that disappear the instant they turn off the current?"

"Fill a room, nothing," Murtry snapped, glaring at the blond fellow as if he very cheerfully could wring his neck. "It can be engineered down to convenient size."

"Maybe, Bart. Maybe it can, but you still can't engineer out the extra tubes and coils and condensers that always will run up its cost to double that of a video which will give its owner exactly as much information and entertainment. You—"

"That's it!" Mal Parker's exclamation cut Adlair short. "That's the moneymaking angle you're looking for, Billiken. Entertainment."

This was something new, Parker offering an idea for making money. "Go ahead, Mal," I encouraged him, silkily. It would be ridiculous, of course, and I'd have another chance to slap him down. "Tell us about it. What sort of entertainment video can't present as well?"

"A sort these youngsters, wouldn't know anything about because tri-dimensional video killed it before they were old enough to be entertained by anything except a rattle. Look, Billiken. Has any show video has brought to you ever given you anywhere near the kick we used to get sitting in the balcony of the old Bijou Theater? Wasn't there something we got not from the performers but from the audience? Didn't sharing our emotions with a thousand others physically present heighten our own emotions?"

"Mass hysteria," I grunted. "Crowd psychology—crowd!" I caught up the word. "Those old shows certainly did pull in the crowds and they paid. They paid plenty, but the huge wages offered actors and actresses by the video companies made it impossible—Hold on!" The nape of my neck puckered with the chill prickles of inspiration. "This thing of yours—there's no limit to the number of material images it can recreate from one prototype, is there?"

"No, Billiken. Nor to the distance from the original."

"And to all intents and purposes they're exactly the same as living persons. The scenery too. We'd need to build only one set." My mind was working at fever heat now. "We could have a single company acting in, say New York, and it would appear simultaneously in—"

"Any number of cities, towns and villages," Parker caught fire from me, "wherever you had theaters with identical stages!"

"Precisely. So that the cost of the original production can be divided by any desired number of theaters into which your device can put it. The possibilities for profit are enormous." I pulled in breath. "You see, Mal, what a practical man can do with one of your scientific toys."

"Wonderful," Murtry exclaimed, but Adlair simply looked confused, as did Sherry. Her father, however was for once properly impressed. "I never cease being amazed at the way your mind works, Billiken. You honestly think that you—I mean I suppose that by tomorrow morning you'll have your bright young men selling stock in the—"

"Loring Multidram Corporation," I named it in one of those flashes of inspiration Lorne Randall calls the mark of my peculiar genius. "No. Not quite as quickly as all that. We've got to put on a public demonstration first, in the ten key cities where my best suck—er—where the outstanding investors in my promotions reside."

I was pacing the floor now as my mind raced, planning the operation. "Mal. Prepare blueprints and specifications for the patent lawyers and another set for the engineering department so that they can start producing the pilot sets. You'll supervise that. Murtry," I turned to the swarthy youth. "I want you to take charge of erecting the theaters and installing the apparatus as the sets come out of the workshop. I'll have the office give you a list of the cities. Sherry, my dear. How would you like to select the first play we present, hire the director and performers and so on?"

Her eyes were topazes lit from within. "I'd love it."

"The job's yours, then." She'd get a tremendous kick out of it and it didn't make much difference how good the play was or how well acted, the novelty would put it over. "I'll have my regular staff take care of the publicity." That I couldn't trust to amateurs. "I think that covers everything."

"How about Robin?" Sherry asked. "You haven't given him anything to do."

"No, I haven't." I looked at the fellow, standing spraddle-legged in the center of the room and thought of a way to wipe that lazy but somehow insolent grin from his face. "I'll tell you what you can do, Adlair. You can assist your friend Murtry. Under his orders, of course."

3:  Death From A Shadow

CERTAIN disturbing business developments engrossed all my attention and I completely forgot about the Multidram project until my secretary reminded me that the demonstration was only a week off. I learned then that one change had been made in the original plan. Sherry Parker had employed a number of players under contract to rival video networks with studios located at different points in the United States, two in England and one in Paris.

Since this made it impossible to assemble the cast at any one place, it had been decided to install transmitters as well as receivers in all ten theaters. In this way some performers could speak their lines in New York, others in Los Angeles, London and so on, but the net effect still would be the same as though all were playing on a single stage.

The scenery was erected in Los Angeles, would be reproduced in material image on the other stages. The originals of the smaller properties, books, maps, and the like, would be placed at the location of the characters who initially handled them.

It was Bart Murtry who'd worked out this solution to the difficulty. He'd further justified my estimate of his ability by building the ten theaters in exact replica, auditoriums as well as stages, thus effecting a considerable saving in architects' fees and the cost of fabrication.

Instead of a sophisticated, modern piece written for video, Sherry had preserved the archaic flavor of the presentation by reviving a mid-twentieth century war play replete with the swashbuckling heroics, air raid alarms, gunfire and other bellicose trappings of that bygone era. All this gave me an idea. "See here, Foster," I told my secretary, "We'll reserve seats and issue tickets to the people we're inviting to the premiere."

"An excellent idea, sir." He hesitated, tugged at the sandy mustache he was cultivating with sparse success. "Er—what are tickets, Mr. Loring?"

I laughed, for the first time in weeks. "Tickets, Foster, are—Oh, look here." I riffled the sheets he'd laid on my desk, found the plan of the auditoriums. "Suppose we mark these rows of seats A, B, C and so on, starting at the front, and number the chairs in each row, like this."

It wasn't till I sketched an old-fashioned theatre ticket, with its coded stub, that the principle finally penetrated. "Now I understand, sir. It's like place-cards at a formal banquet, a system of assigning the more desirable locations to guests you want particularly to honor."

"Precisely." There was no need to explain that it also was a way of establishing a price scale based more on the snob-value of location than the ease of hearing and seeing. "That's why I shall myself decide who is to sit where. Let me have those lists of invites."

"Here they are, sir." He handed them to me. "But I'm afraid you won't have time to do that just now, Mr. Loring. Mr. Hanscom's waiting to see you."

"Mr. who?"

"Maxwell Hanscom of the United Nations Securities Control Board. You gave him an eleven o'clock appointment."

"Oh, yes. I remember now." I didn't have to remember. I'd been anticipating Hanscom's visit all morning, and not with pleasure. "About this Multidram demonstration, Foster. Inform Murtry I'll want to inspect the entire installation and attend a dress rehearsal." My fingers drummed the arm of my chair. "All right. Send Mr. Hanscom in."

The door to my office is thirty feet from my desk. By the time the gray little man had crossed that space, I knew that here was a government official I might be able to deceive for a little while but could not buy.

NEW ORLEANS, Manchester, Rio de Janeiro and the rest of the ten cities selected for the première Multridram performance of Escape from Destiny saw something that Spring day they'd not seen for a generation. Crowds. There was, it seemed, some strange, atavistic contagion in the notion of people actually gathering together to watch and listen to anything. The thousands who milled about the identical structures Murtry had erected could observe the proceedings sitting comfortably in their homes far better than being jostled and trampled here, but here they were.

As sweating police cleared a path for me to the entrance of the New York Bijou—so Malvin Parker had named the theaters in obeisance to our student rendezvous—I knew Billingsley Loring was on the brink of his greatest success, or at the end of his career.

Sherry was in Los Angeles, where the majority of the company were physically present, her father in Chicago supervising the master switchboard. Bart Murtry had taken off a couple of hours ago for London, to oversee the pick-up for the two British Isles stages and Paris and Moscow.

Just where Robin Adlair was I did not know. My last-minute decision anent the seating arrangements had necessitated a rush job of training ushers which Murtry had turned over to him. All the past week he'd been darting about the world in the Loring Skyfleet's speediest stratojetter and we'd completely lost track of him.

From what I saw here in New York, I had to admit that he'd done a good job. Quaintly clad in long-trousered, button-studded blue uniforms such as I hadn't seen for decades, the teen-age youngsters were well rehearsed. Not so the gathering audience. In spite of the careful letters of explanation that had accompanied each ticket, many were lamentably confused as to what was expected of them. One couple in their thirties, as a matter of fact, had to be forcibly removed from the front row seats to which they insisted they were entitled by the rule of first come, first served.

I'd given strict instructions that every spectator was to occupy the location his ticket called for and the Loring organization is schooled to obey instructions to the letter.

The turmoil finally subsided. I went down the central aisle to the seat I had reserved for myself. A cherub-faced lad rushed up to me, checked my stub. "A-1. Thank you, sir." He saluted and rushed busily off again. This first row of chairs was separated only by a brass rail from a six foot deep, empty trench that ran clear across the auditorium's floor. Beyond this rose the curving face of the raised stage and from this in turn, high and graceful, the shimmering golden folds of a vast curtain emblazoned with huge, floral-wreathed L's.

The sourceless illumination that filled the auditorium began to dim: A hush of tense expectancy gripped the audience. There was an instant of complete, velvety darkness, then a glitter and flash of chromium and polished wood exploded in front of and below me; musical instruments catching sudden light concentrated in the pit and splintering it into a myriad coruscations. In the blackness behind me, a thousand throats gasped. The dress-suited musicians swept bows across strings. A single handclap spatted as some oldster recalled the ways of his youth, then another, a third.

The sounds rippled, spread, merged into a torrent of applause.

The clapping died away. The orchestra's triumphal strains waned till only a single violin sang softly. An aureate glow spread over the great curtain and it was rising, slowly at first, then more swiftly.

The stage it revealed was vacant! Bare floorboards stretched back to a blank wall of gray plasticrete. Something had gone wrong.

No. The stage was transformed into a room ugly with the flowered design of its papered walls, shut in by the black cloth awkwardly tacked over windows. Clumsy wooden furniture cluttered it, a table was covered by a white cloth and set as for a meal not yet served. In the left-hand sidewall—the stage's left—was a closed door, a wooden door complete with ceramic doorknob. Another, similar door to the right rear was open a bare inch. Holding it so and peering through the crack was a woman's taut, listening figure.

Slumped in a chair by the table, head propped in elbow-propped hands and every line eloquent of a fatigue that rendered him incapable of the fear that gripped the woman, was a young man in clothing torn, filthy with mud.

The applause rose again in a great, cresting wave that washed over me.

Underlying the surf of pounding palms was another, rhythmic sound the world has not heard for decades, the ominous thud of marching feet dulled by distance. Nearing it beat down the applause, seemed just outside the black-swathed windows.

A voice suddenly barked an unintelligible order. Silence. A sense of apprehension flowed from the woman at the door, a feeling of fear that could not possibly have been transmitted to that audience by a video image. The unseen voice spoke again, gutturally, and the feet thudded again, dispersing.

"They've tracked you to the village," the woman whispered. "They're searching the houses along the street." She pushed the door shut soundlessly, turned from it.

Hand to throat she moved across the floor toward the unmoving man at the table, eyes big with terror in a white and haggard face. In Neva's face! Neva—No, not Neva of course but her daughter Sherry—whispered. "They'll be here in a moment. Come. I'll hide you."

Why was Sherry playing the part for which Lilli Denton had rehearsed? I was out of my seat. Crouching low to avoid being silhouetted against the lighted stag I made for its left-hand corner.

"I'm not hiding." The voice above me was hoarse with weariness and defeat. "I'm going out there to give myself up. You people have suffered enough—" It faded, as I went through the little door and found myself a place crowded with the glowing bulbs, of coils and condenser's and serpentining leads of the Multidram apparatus.

The air was prickly with the tension of high potential, an incautious movement here might mean instant and terrible death. Explaining the setup last week, Bart Murtry had warned me not to brush against this lead, this switch. I was tight-strung, the palms sweating, by the time I reached the wings and looked through what to the audience seemed to be a papered wall, a closed door, out into the black dark of the auditorium.

I could make out clearly only the first row of rapt faces, the gap made by the aisle and the seat I'd left unoccupied. Directly in front of me the man was on his feet now, Sherry beside him, their backs to me as, frozen in consternation, they watched the other door thud shut behind a bull-necked individual who snatched an automatic from the belt-holster of his green uniform.

His lips stretched in a humorless, sinister smile. "As I thought." Vindictive lights crawled in his skin-pouched eyes. "I knew only you and your blackguard husband would dare give this pig a refuge. That is why I sent my men to search the other houses and came here alone."

The woman gathered herself, forced out words. "You mean that your silence can be purchased, Captain Markin. With what? We have nothing left with which to bribe you."

"Except yourself, my dear Elsa—not forced but willing. You are a fever in my veins and—"

Markin cut off as the door here before me flew open and a gaunt man stepped through into the scene, a revolver clutched in his lifting hand.

"Franz!" Elsa exclaimed but the shots crashed in a single report. The captain turned. Franz folded, clutching his chest.

A scream shrilled from the audience, a shout husky with terror. Ushers were running down the aisle to where a man had jumped up and was pointing with shaking hand at the seat in which I should be sitting.

I stood on a stage abruptly bare again. The figures that had occupied it had vanished. Robin Adlair stepped out of the other wing, stared out into the auditorium at the front row seat, the bright pleon(?) of whose back was gashed by the bullet that had ploughed into it and, had I been sitting there, would have smashed into my chest instead.

4: Nine-Fold Killing

OTHERS were not as fortunate as I. In Chicago, in London, in Rio de Janeiro, in each of the theaters where a fascinated audience had watched the premiere performance of a Multidrama, a bullet had ploughed into the occupant of seat A-1. A single shot, fired from a single stage had slain nine men in nine separate cities scattered over half the world.

"One of the strange features of this case," Rand Pardeen said later, "is that our examination of the guns used in the play disclosed that only blanks were fired from them." Burly, rock-jawed and steel-eyed, the Chief Inspector of UN's World Police had requested me to assemble in his office all of us who were primarily responsible for the Multidram; Malvin and Sherry Parker, Bart Murtry, Robin Adlair. "No molecules of lead were found in the barrel of the one fired in Los Angeles by the actor who played Franz, or of that which the character of Captain Markin shot off in London."

"How about the bullets?" Sherry asked. None of us looked particularly chipper but she seemed especially worn, probably from the strain of stepping into the role of Elsa when Lilli Denton was taken suddenly ill the very morning of the performance. "I—" she smiled wanly. "I have a secret vice, inspector. I once found a collection of ancient detective books Dad made when he was a boy and I've read them all. According to them, the police always extract the murder bullet from the corpse and examine it to find out from what gun it came."

Pardeen appeared grimly amused. "Quite right, Miss Parker. We should have done exactly that except for another odd circumstance. The surgeons who performed the autopsies on the bodies of the nine murdered men found no bullet in any of them."

The stir this announcement evoked gave me a chance to glance again at the gray little man who sat inconspicuously in a corner, nursing a brief case. Why was Maxwell Hanscom here? Why should the UN Securities Control Board be represented at the investigation of a crime?

"Your people must have slipped up somehow, Mr. Pardeen," Mal Parker was saying. "Nine of the slugs obviously were material images which were dissipated the instant I pulled the master switch in Chicago, shutting down the network, but there must have been a real prototype that continued to exist. You should have found it."

"We did," Pardeen replied. "We found it, not buried in the chest of any of the dead men, but in the upholstery of the seat Mr. Loring would have occupied had he not so opportunely decided to go backstage."

My fingers closed on my chair's arms so tightly the edges dug into flesh. "The actual shot was fired in New York, then. It was meant for me. I was the one the murderer was after."

"So it would seem, Mr. Loring. The killer knew where you would be seated. He knew there was a moment in the play when the sound of his shot would be covered by shots on the stage. Apparently he did not know his missile would be reproduced so that it would kill nine others, and that seems to eliminate all of you who are familiar with the mechanics of this thing."

"I disagree, Inspector." Pardeen's gray eyes moved to Murtry, who went on, "It eliminates none of us."

Pardeen stared at Murtry with somber interest. "You suggest that the slayer didn't care how many others died as long as his shot reached his intended victim?"

"I do not. I mean that as far as any of us knew, no one but Mr. Loring would be reached by a shot fired at him from the New York stage. The Multidram receiver and transmitter fields were supposed to end sharply at the outer edge of the orchestra pits. If that had been the case, only the actual bullet would have passed beyond the vertical plane of the brass rail that edged the pit."

"Very good, Bart," Robin Adlair drawled. "A very sound point—and an excellent red herring."

"Red herring!" Murtry pushed up out of his chair, black eyes blazing. "What in blazes are you getting at?"

"Whatever you want to make of it," the blond chap grinned, but his implication was clear. A clever killer well might try to avert suspicion from himself by disputing a theory that seemed to exculpate him from suspicion. "I'm curious about one thing, though. What makes you so sure the shot came from the stage?"

The other's lips pulled back from his teeth in what he might have meant for a smile but was more like a snarl. "That's obvious to anyone but a moron, or someone who'd like to have us think it was fired from somewhere else. Coming from anywhere in the auditorium it could not have struck the back of the seat." The smoldering antagonism founded in their rivalry for Sherry was no longer covert but had flared into an open feud.

"It seems to me, Mr. Robin Adlair," Murtry purred, "that you've more reason to draw herrings across the trail than I."

I could read Pardeen's mind as he glanced from one to the other. "Keep up the squabble, boys," he was thinking, "and maybe one of you will drop the clue I'm looking for."

"I seem to recall," Murtry continued, "that when the lights went on you were standing there on the New York stage."

"Right." The blonde giant grinned. "I figured on getting to the New York Bijou in time to check the set, but the crowd outside held me up and I got inside the entrance, which is on the right of the house, just as the lights were dimming. I thought I could still make it but was caught on the right of the stage by the curtain going up, couldn't cross without exposing myself."

"You were delayed, all right," Murtry snapped back at him. "You reached the wings just as the actors were about to fire their blanks and you had to get off your own shot so fast that you didn't notice Mr. Loring wasn't where he was supposed to be."

He'd slipped the noose around Adlair's neck as neatly as I could have.

"No, Robin," Sherry moaned. "No. You couldn't!"

"Yes, kitten, I could." The fellow seemed oddly unperturbed. "Our Bart has built up a swell case against me. Hasn't he, Inspector?" He transferred his lazy grin to Pardeen. "Almost as good a case as you had when you were about to arrest me. And it suffers from the same defect."

"I'm afraid it does," the law officer agreed. "You see, Mr. Murtry, the weapon whose rifling the murder bullet matches was found some ten minutes after the shot was fired and while Mr. Adlair still was in the custody of the New York police, on the stage of the Chicago theater."

That really was a crusher. Eyes met widening eyes in puzzlement, breaths sighed in an almost eerie hush which was broken by Adlair's chuckle. "Maybe you can figure that one out. Bart."

"Maybe I can." Murtry wasn't beaten yet. "In fact, I know that answer. What you did was to cache your gun in Chicago, within the area the receiver there would scan. When the Multidram was switched on, it was reproduced at the same spot on all the stage. You picked up its material image in New York, loaded it with a real cartridge which in turn was recreated in the other nine theaters and fired it."

"Doctor Parker turned off the current and presto!— no gun on you, nothing to connect you with the gun in Chicago. Except—"

It was he who grinned now, triumphantly.

"Except, Inspector Pardeen, that the flashback of powder gases from the real cartridge will have left their mark on the skin of his right hand."

"Good boy!" The inspector jumped up. "That does it. We'll apply the wax test, right here and now." He strode to the door, jerked it open. "Jenkins," he called. "Ashkinazy. I've got a little job for you."

There was a muttered conference at the door, a wait, then two uniformed men came in carrying a tray with some simple apparatus on it. As, still smiling but a little uneasily, Robin Adlair submitted to their ministrations the man from the UN spoke for the first time.

"You know, Inspector Pardeen, there's something about this that still bothers me."

"What's that?"

"Why the Multidram field was enlarged to include Mr. Loring's seat. There doesn't seem to have been any reason for that."

Pardeen looked at Murtry but I answered for him. "Does there have to be a reason, Mr. Hanscom? I imagine it was a slight, if unfortunate misadjustment of the control apparatus in Chicago. After all, Mr. Parker was undoubtedly a little excited over the first public test of his new invention and—well, he isn't as young as he used to be."

"Meaning that I'm superannuated, Billiken?" Mal Parker demanded, bristling. "Why don't you pension me off, if that's the case?"

"Perhaps I will, Mal," I couldn't resist responding. "Remind me to consider it after your protege has been properly taken care of."

"Pardon me, Mr. Loring," Hanscom intervened. "I don't want to seem persistent but I can't help wondering if the misadjustment need necessarily have been made at the central controls in Chicago."

"Now look here, Hanscom," I flared. "What right have you—"

"Just a minute, Billiken," Mal Parker interrupted me. "Since that concerns me directly, I'd like to clear it up. The answer to your question, Mr. Hanscom, is that all ten Multidram transceivers were electronically interlocked so as to avoid the possibility of overlapping or other faulty registry. A change in the adjustment of any one would affect them all. Look. I'll draw you a diagram that will make it clear. May I have a paper and pencil, Inspector?"

Pardeen started to fish in his pocket, turned to the slender, sharp-featured officer who approached him.

"Well, Ashkinazy, what have you got?"

Mask-faced, the chap held out a crinkling film of wax.

"Look for yourself, sir." It showed the roughnesses of Adlair's skin, and nothing else. "That guy didn't shoot off any gun in the last twenty-four hours, not with either hand."

There was a small, hawking sound in Bart Murtry's throat, from Sherry Parker a glad cry as she flew to the blond giant.

"I knew it, Robin. I knew you didn't do it."

"So did I, honey," he grinned as he caught her and held her. "But someone did. I wonder if it wasn't the one who tried to fasten it on me." His broad face was abruptly grim. "I suggest, Inspector, that you submit Bart Murtry to this same test."

"Why Murtry?" Maxwell Hanscom asked. "We have absolute proof that he was in London at the time of the murders." He seemed suddenly to have taken over command of the proceedings and the frightening thing was that Pardeen let him. "Why not Billingsley Loring?"

"That's absurd!" I flared. "Are you intimating that I tried to murder myself, Mr. Hanscom?"

He turned those penetrating cold gray eyes on me;

"No, Mr. Loring. I'm simply recalling that like Mr. Adlair, you were on the stage of the New York theater in position to fire the real bullet in the imaged gun. In position also, as Mr. Adlair was not, to have made the slight change in the transceiver's setting that resulted in the death of the nine men to whom you'd sent tickets to seat A-one. The same nine men who brought against you the charges I've been investigating of fraudulent operation of corporations whose stock they bought from you, and without whose evidence the charges must be dropped."

Inspector Pardeen was coming toward me and his uniformed aides were closing in on me from either side but I saw only Neva's shocked eyes, Neva's color-drained, cameo features.

"No," Neva's daughter whispered. "No, Uncle Billiken. You couldn't have."

But I had. It was the only way I could have saved the great commercial empire I'd slaved for years to build. What were the lives of nine money-grubbers against that?

End

Table of Contents

- 1: The Great Dome on Mercury
- 2: When the Sleepers Woke
- 3: The Land Where Time Stood Still
- 4: The Lanson Screen
- 5: Flight Of The Silver Eagle
- 6: Lost In Time
- 7: The Cavern Of The Shining Pool
- 8: The Green Ray
- 9: The Two Moons Of Tranquillia
- 10: No Escape from Destiny