ps. Already some are rising from Ferrok-Shahn, from Grebhar
and from Greater New York."

"We knew they were doing that."

"But now they know our purpose. The Master Intelligence fears that
they will come raiding Wandl. Our vessels are being made ready to go
out and repel them."

The hollow voice ceased.

"Your purpose discovered?" asked Anita. "What does that mean? Won't
you tell us now? Twin queens for your future Mars, and you treat us
like children!"

"That light-beam he so cleverly planted in Greater New York," Venza
hinted.

"Yes, I will tell you. Without me in New York and my men who went with
these Wandlites to Ferrok-Shahn and Grebhar, the vital gravity beams
could never successfully have been planted. The apparatus was
complicated; you saw it. You saw the labor I had making the contact?"

"But what are the light-beams for?"

I listened, breathless, as he told them. The electronic beams could
not be destroyed; a disintegration of the rock atoms had been set up.
With each rotation of the Earth it was sweeping the sky. From a great
control station, Wandl was flinging attraction gravity upon that beam,
using it as a monstrous lever upon the rotation of Earth. With every
daily passage now the force was being exerted. The rotation was
slowing. In a few days it would stop, with the end of the beam drawn
to Wandl and held there.

And the beams from Grebhar and Ferrok-Shahn were the same. Three giant
chains! Then Wandl, traveling of its own gravitational volition, would
withdraw from our solar system. The gravitational chains would pull
the Earth, Venus and Mars after it!

Titanic tow-ropes! The destruction, not of our worlds, but of all life
upon them, for the cold of interstellar space would leave no living
organism. Three dead worlds; Wandl would draw them to her own Sun and
then free them, send them, with new orbits, around the distant blazing
star. Three new worlds brought home triumphantly by Wandl to join the
little family of inhabited planets revolving around this other Sun.
Three fair and lovely worlds, warmed back by the other sunlight to be
green mansions untenanted, ready to receive the new beings who would
come and possess them.

9

"You, Snap!"

"Gregg! But how...?"

"Hush! They might hear us."

"They can do more than that. They can almost hear you think."

"Anita and Venza are here."

"I know it. I was with them for a time. This accursed gravity! I can't
walk."

"Careful