into the sky from somewhere on the desert.

When people became amazed at his story he added to it. There had been
five columns of light instead of one. The one he had first mentioned had
touched the Earth, or had shot up from the Earth, within several miles
of his point of vantage. A second glowed off to the northwest, a third
to the southwest, a fourth to the southeast, the fifth to the northeast.
The first one seemed to "center" the other four--they might have been
the five legs of a table, according to their arrangement....

Arrangement! Jeter wondered how that word had happened to come to him.

* * * * *

The story of the fellow who had seen the columns of light might have
been believed if he had stuck to his first yarn of seeing but one. But
when he mentioned five ... well, he didn't have any too good a
reputation for veracity and wasn't regarded as being overly bright.
Besides, he had stated that the thickness of the columns of light seemed
to be the same from the ground as far as his eyes could follow them
upward. Everybody knew that a searchlight's beams spread out a bit.

"I wonder," thought Jeter, "why the kid didn't say he saw those five
columns move--like a five-legged animal, walking."

Silly, of course, but behind the silliness of the thought Jeter thought
there might be something of interest, something on which to work.

The Jeter-Eyer space ship still was not finished--though almost--when
the world moved into the third week since the disappearance of Franz
Kress.

An Indian in the Southwest had reported seeing one of those columns of
light. However, this merited just a line on about page sixteen, even of
the newspaper closest to the spot where the redskin had seen the column.

"Eyer," said Jeter at last, "we've got to start digging into newspaper
stories, especially into stories which deal with unusually queer
happenings throughout the world. I've a hunch that the keys to Kress'
disappearance may be found in some of them, or a combination of a great
many of them."

"How do you mean, Lucian?"

"Don't you notice that all this queer stuff has been happening since
Kress left? It sounds silly, perhaps, but I feel sure that the
disappearance of those steers in Wyoming, the story the boy told about
the columns of light--yes, all five of them!--and the Indian's partial
confirmation of it, are all tied up together with the disappearance of
Kress."

* *