as her father and brother.

I called upon Professor Newland the evening of the day his statement was
published, and found all three discussing it.

"You want me to talk for publication, don't you, Bob Trevor?" the
professor asked suddenly, after we had exchanged a few pleasantries.

He was a wiry little man, about sixty, smooth-shaven, with sparse gray
hair, a rugged face of strong character, and a restless air of energy
about him. He was an indefatigable worker; indeed, I am confident that,
for any single continuous period of work without sleep, he could have run
Alan and me into the ground and still have been comparatively fresh.

"You want an exclusive follow-up story from me to-night, don't you?" he
repeated.

I admitted that I did.

"What you'll get won't be just what you expect. Look at this."

He pulled one of the evening papers toward him vigorously. "They think it
is humorous. There--read that."

The item to which he pointed was a sprightly account of the weird beings
that might shortly arrive from Mercury.

"They think it's a joke--some of them. There's another--read that."

The attitude of the press was distinctly an inclination to treat the
affair from the humorous side. I had seen indications of that during the
day at the office.

"Look here, Bob"--the professor swept all the papers aside with his hand.
"You put it to them this way. Make them see this is not a prediction of
the end of the world. We've had those before--nobody pays any attention to
them, and rightly so. But this Mercutian Light is more than a theory--it's
a fact. We fought it last November, and we'll have to fight it again next
month. That's what I want to make them realize."

"They'll think it is worth being serious about," Alan put in, "if one of
those lights drop into Boston or New York--especially if it happens to
play in a horizontal direction instead of vertical."

We went into the whole subject thoroughly, and the professor gave me a
second signed statement in which he called upon the nations of the world
to prepare for the coming peril.

The actual characteristics of the Mercutian Light we had discussed before
several times. A good deal had been printed about it during the previous
December--without, as I have said, attracting much public attention. The
two meteors had been examined. They were found to be of a mineral that
could have originated on Mercury. They were burned and pitted like other
meteorites by their pa