pected of her. And when she stopped at a certain door
and inserted a key, he remembered Athalia. What if she should enter with
Adam in Present Time?

* * * * *

They were inside Adam's laboratory, a huge apartment filled with queer
apparatus and cages of live animals. The room was a strange paradox.
Part of the equipment, the walls, and the floor was glistening with
newness, and part was moulding with extreme age. The powers of
disintegration that haunt a tropical forest seemed to be devouring
certain spots of the room. Here, in the midst of bright marble, was a
section of wall that seemed as old as the pyramids. The surface of the
stone had an appalling mouldiness, as though it had been lifted from an
ancient graveyard where it had lain in the festering ground for
unwholesome centuries.

Between cracks in this stained and decayed section of stone grew fetid
moss that quivered with the microscopic organisms that infest age-rotten
places. Sections of the flooring and woodwork also reeked with
mustiness. In one dark, webby corner of the room lay a pile of bleached
bones, still tinted with the ghastly grays and pinks of putrefaction.
Northwood, overwhelmingly nauseated, withdrew his eyes from the bones,
only to see, in another corner, a pile of worm-eaten clothing that lay
on the floor in the outline of a man.

Faint with the reek of ancient mustiness, Northwood retreated to the
door, dizzy and staggering.

"It sickens you," said Eve, "and it sickens me also, for death and decay
are not pleasant. Yet Nature, left to herself, reduces all to this.
Every grave that has yawned to receive its prey hides corruption no less
shocking. Nature's forces of creation and destruction forever work in
partnership. Never satisfied with her composition, she destroys and
starts again, building, building towards the ultimate of perfection.
Thus, it is natural that if Dr. Mundson isolated the Life Ray, Nature's
supreme force of compensation, isolation of the Death Ray should closely
follow. Adam, thirsting for power, has succeeded. A few sweeps of his
unholy ray of decomposition will undo all Dr. Mundson's work in this
valley and reduce it to a stinking holocaust of destruction. And the
time for his striking has come!"

She seized his face and drew it toward her. "Quick!" she said. "We'll
have to go back to the third dimension. I could leave you safe in the
fourth, but if anything should happen to me, you