escent. It canted
to one side to head off the struggling plane that could never escape,
did not try to escape. The steady wings held true upon their straight
course. From above came the silver meteor; it seemed striking at the
very plane itself. It was almost upon it before it belched forth the
cushioning blast of gas.

Through the forming clouds a plane bored in swiftly. It rolled slowly,
was flying upside down. It was under the enemy! Its ray.... Thurston was
thrown a score of feet away to crash helpless into the stone coping by
the thunderous crash of the explosion.

There were fragments falling from a dense cloud--fragments of curved and
silvery metal ... the wing of a plane danced and fluttered in the
air....

"He fired its bombs," whispered Thurston in a shaking voice. "He killed
the other devils where they lay--he destroyed this with its own
explosive. He flew upside down to shoot up with the ray, to set off its
shells...."

His mind was fumbling with the miracle of it. "Clever pilot, Riley, in a
dog-fight...." And then he realized.

Cyrus Thurston, millionaire sportsman, sank slowly, numbly to the roof
of the Equitable Building that still stood. And New York was still there
... and the whole world....

He sobbed weakly, brokenly. Through his dazed brain flashed a sudden,
mind-saving thought. He laughed foolishly through his sobs.

"And you said he'd die horribly, Mac, a horrible death." His head
dropped upon his arms, unconscious--and safe--with the rest of
humanity.

* * * * *

The Corpse on the Grating

_By Hugh B. Cave_

In the gloomy depths of the old warehouse Dale saw a thing that
drew a scream of horror to his dry lips. It was a corpse--the
mold of decay on its long-dead features--and yet it was alive!

[Illustration: _It was a corpse, standing before me like some propped-up
thing from the grave._]

It was ten o'clock on the morning of December 5 when M. S. and I left
the study of Professor Daimler. You are perhaps acquainted with M. S.
His name appears constantly in the pages of the Illustrated News, in
conjunction with some very technical article on psycho-analysis or with
some extensive study of the human brain and its functions. He is a
psycho-fanatic, more or less, and has spent an entire lifetime of some
seventy-odd years in pulling apart human skulls for the purpose of
investigation. Lovely pursuit!

For some twenty years I ha