a hand lift, a
shining dart speed from it straight toward Rador's back. Instinctively
I thrust him aside. He turned upon me angrily. I pointed to where the
little missile lay, still quivering, on the ground. He gripped my
hand.

"That, some day I will repay!" he said. I looked again at the thing.
At its end was a tiny cone covered with a glistening, gelatinous
substance.

Rador pulled from a tree beside us a fruit somewhat like an apple.

"Look!" he said. He dropped it upon the dart--and at once, before my
eyes, in less than ten seconds, the fruit had rotted away!

"That's what would have happened to Rador but for you, friend!" he
said.

Come now between this and the prelude to the latter half of the drama
whose history this narrative is--only scattering and necessarily
fragmentary observations.

First--the nature of the ebon opacities, blocking out the spaces
between the pavilion-pillars or covering their tops like roofs, These
were magnetic fields, light absorbers, negativing the vibrations of
radiance; literally screens of electric force which formed as
impervious a barrier to light as would have screens of steel.

They instantaneously made night appear in a place where no night was.
But they interposed no obstacle to air or to sound. They were
extremely simple in their inception--no more miraculous than is glass,
which, inversely, admits the vibrations of light, but shuts out those
coarser ones we call air--and, partly, those others which produce upon
our auditory nerves the effects we call sound.

Briefly their mechanism was this:

[For the same reason that Dr. Goodwin's exposition of the mechanism
of the atomic engines was deleted, his description of the
light-destroying screens has been deleted by the Executive
Council.--J. B. F., President, I. A. of S.]

There were two favoured classes of the ladala--the soldiers and the
dream-makers. The dream-makers were the most astonishing social
phenomena, I think, of all. Denied by their circumscribed environment
the wider experiences of us of the outer world, the Murians had
perfected an amazing system of escape through the imagination.

They were, too, intensely musical. Their favourite instruments were
double flutes; immensely complex pipe-organs; harps, great and small.
They had another remarkable instrument made up of a double octave of
small drums which gave forth percussions remarkably disturbing to the
emotional centres.

It was this love of