had wanted a look at this so
marvelous ship--he had spied upon it; he admitted it. But this
murderous attack was none of his doing; his men had got out of hand;
and then he had thought it best to take Chet, unconscious as he was,
and return with him where he could have care.

* * * * *

And Chet Bullard kept his eyes steadily upon the protesting man and
said nothing, but he was thinking of a number of things. There was
Walt's warning, "this Schwartzmann means mischief," and the faked
message that had brought him from the hospital to get the ship from
its hiding place; no, it was too much to believe. But Chet's eyes were
unchanging, and he nodded shortly in agreement as the other concluded.

"You will take us back?" Schwartzmann was asking. "I will repay you
well for what inconvenience we have caused. The ship, you will return
it safely to the place where it was?"

And Chet, after making and discarding a score of plans, knew there was
nothing else he could do. He swung the little metal ball into a
sharply-banked turn. The straight ray of light from an impossibly
brilliant sun struck now on a forward lookout; it shone across the
shoulder of a great globe to make a white, shining crescent as of a
giant moon. It was Earth; and Chet brought the bow-sights to bear on
that far-off target, while again the thunderous blast was built up to
drive them back along the trackless path on which they had come. But
he wondered, as he pressed forward on the control, what the real plan
of this man, Schwartzmann, might be....

* * * * *

Less than half an hour brought them to the Repelling Area, and Chet
felt the upward surge as he approached it. Here, above this magnetic
field where gravitation's pull was nullified, had been the air-lanes
for fast liners. Empty lanes they were now; for the R. A., as the
flying fraternity knew it--the Heaviside Layer of an earlier
day--marked the danger line above which the mysterious serpents lay in
wait. Only the speed of Chet's ship saved them; more than one of the
luminous monsters was in sight as he plunged through the invisible R.
A. and threw on their bow-blast strongly to check their fall.

Then, as he set a course that would take them to that section of the
Arctic waste where the ship had been, he pondered once more upon the
subject of this Schwartzmann of the shifty eyes and the glib tongue
and of his men who had "got out of han