IME TRANSPOSITION.

Another code-combination added a third line:

(ATTRACTING PUBLIC NOTICE AMONG INHABITANTS.)

He pressed the "start"-button; the headings vanished, to be replaced by
page after page of print, succeeding one another on the screen as the
two men read. They told strange and apparently disconnected stories--of
unexplained fires and explosions; of people vanishing without trace; of
unaccountable disasters to aircraft. There were many stories of an
epidemic of mysterious disk-shaped objects seen in the sky, singly or
in numbers. To each account was appended one or more reference-numbers.
Sometimes Tortha Karf or Verkan Vall would punch one of these, and read,
on an adjoining screen, the explanatory matter referred to.

Finally Tortha Karf leaned back and lit a fresh cigarette.

"Yes, indeed, Vall; very definitely we will have to take action in the
matter of the runaway nighthound of the late Gavran Sarn," he said.
"I'd forgotten that that was the time-line onto which the _Ardrath_
expedition launched those antigrav disks. If this extraterrestrial
monstrosity turns up, on the heels of that 'Flying Saucer' business,
everybody above the order of intelligence of a cretin will suspect
some connection."

"What really happened, in the _Ardrath_ matter?" Verkan Vall inquired.
"I was on the Third Level, on that Luvarian Empire operation, at the time."

"That's right; you missed that. Well, it was one of these
joint-operation things. The Paratime Commission and the Space Patrol
were experimenting with a new technique for throwing a spaceship into
paratime. They used the cruiser _Ardrath_, Kalzarn Jann commanding. Went
into space about halfway to the Moon and took up orbit, keeping on the
sunlit side of the planet to avoid being observed. That was all right.
But then, Captain Kalzarn ordered away a flight of antigrav disks, fully
manned, to take pictures, and finally authorized a landing in the
western mountain range, Northern Continent, Minor Land-Mass. That's
when the trouble started."

He flipped the run-back switch, till he had recovered the page he
wanted. Verkan Vall read of a Fourth Level aviator, in his little
airscrew-drive craft, sighting nine high-flying saucerlike objects.

"That was how it began," Tortha Karf told him. "Before long, as other
incidents of the same sort occurred, our people on that line began
sending back to know what was going on. Naturally, from the different
descriptions