rowed Jim's throat, there
was a terrific strength in the body, wasted though it was almost to a
skeleton.

But it was only for a half-minute that old Parrish's endurance lasted.
Suddenly the old man went limp and tottered forward, dropped upon the
ground. Jim bent over him.

"Parrish, you know me! I'm Jim Dent!" he cried. "I came here to save
you."

Parrish was muttering something. Jim caught the words "Tode," and "God
help Lucille!"

"Parrish, I'm Jim Dent!" Jim cried again, and the old man, shuddering,
opened his eyes and recognized him.

"Jim!" he muttered. "Jim Dent! Then where is she? I got away from that
devil, found farmhouse empty, got telephone book, found her and
'phoned her. Told her to come. Save--Lucille!"

He fell back, his eyes closed. Jim crouched over the unconscious old
man. He was in a state of utter perplexity. He could not quite gather
what Parrish had been trying to tell him, and it was with difficulty
that he could focus his mind upon the situation, so great had been the
shock of finding his former chief in that condition.

What had become of his plane, and where was Lucille? Jim was positive
that he had heard her cry for help out of the vortex in the water.

But there was no water, only the circle of black mud extended in the
starlight.

Again and again Jim shouted Lucille's name, and his cries went echoing
away through the scrub without result.

Jim looked down at the unconscious old man beside him. He must get
Parrish away, get him to Andy Lumm's. He bent over him again and
raised him in his arms.

* * * * *

Suddenly he heard two familiar sounds behind him, two dull thumps that
sounded less like explosions than echoes, long drawn out, and receding
into infinity. There was no other sound quite like them that he had
ever heard.

They were the snap of the electrical discharge as the Atom Smasher
began to operate, and why the snap had sounded like a heavy body
falling a long distance away, was not known.

Tode had said one day, with what Jim had taken for sarcasm, that they
represented the wave series of a single sound extended in time to make
four-dimensional action, but Jim had never considered the explanation
seriously.

That sound, bringing back all Jim's memories of their experiments,
brought him to his feet sharply. He swung around. The surface of the
pool was a bubbling, seething mass of mud and water. And over its
surface that faint viol