can make the jump."

"The battery?" suggested McGuire.

* * * * *

Sykes shook his head. "I tried it. Too long, and besides it would
crumble. They operate these with a lever; I saw it outside." He went
on silently with his study of the door and the little gap between
heavy bolts, which, if closed, would mean security from invasion.

"They're about through," McGuire spoke from his post at the window
after some time. "The rush seems to be about over. I imagine they'll
pull out in the morning."

He pointed as Sykes stood beside him. "Those big ones over beyond have
not been touched all day; only some of the crew, I judge, working
around them. And way over you see forty or fifty whaling big ones:
they must have been ready before we came. They have finished on these
nearer by. It looks like a big day for the brutes."

And Professor Sykes led him on to talk more of the preparations he had
seen, and his deductions as to the morrow. It was all too evident what
was really on the lieutenant's mind. It was not the thought of their
own immediate death, but the terrible dread and horror of Althora's
fate, that hammered and hammered in his brain. To speak of anything
else meant a moment's relief.

Sykes pointed to a tall mast that was set in the plaza pavement, some
hundred feet away. Wires swung from it to several points, one of them
ending above their window and entering the building. "What is that?"
he asked, "--some radio device? That ball of metal on the top might be
an aerial." But McGuire had fallen silent again, and stared stonily at
the deadly fighting ships he was powerless to combat.

* * * * *

On the morning that followed, there was no uncertainty. This was the
day! And from a balconied window up high in the side of a tall stone
building, two men stood wordless and waiting while they watched the
preparations below.

The open space was a sea of motion like flowing blood, where thousands
of figures in dull red marched in rank after rank to be swallowed in
the mammoth ships that McGuire had noted in the distance. Then other
colors, and swarms of what they took to be women-folk of this wild
race--a medley of color that flowed on and on as if it would never
cease, to fill one after another of the great ships.

"Transports, that's what they are," said McGuire. "I can see now why
they have no steel beaks like the others. They don't need any rams,
nor po