of color flung across the eastern
reaches of cloudland. "Vibrate away; but give me _this_!" He fondled
the gleaming gun as if it had been a pet. "I tell you frankly, if
I were in charge here, I'd let the vibrations go to Hell and begin
pumping lead. I'd have all gun-crews at stations, and the second we
got in range I'd open with all six Lewises!"

"Yes, and Nissr would go crumpling down, a minute later, a blazing
sieve fore-and-aft--wings, tanks, fuselage, everything riddled
with thousands of bullets. Vibration is the trick, I tell you. It's
everything.

"All life is vibration. When it ceases, that is death--and even dead
matter vibrates. All our senses depend on vibration. Everything we
feel, see, hear, taste, comes to our knowledge through vibrations.
And the receptive force in us is vibration, too. The brain is just one
great, central ganglion for the taking in of vibrations.

"The secret of life, of the universe itself, is vibration. If we
understood all about that, the cosmos would have no secrets from us.
So now--ah, see there, will you? See, Major, and be convinced!"

He pointed eastward, into the blazing sunrise. The out-fling of his
arm betrayed more human emotion than he had yet shown. Exultation
leaped to his usually impassive eyes. Surely, had not this
expedition--which he had hoped would give surcease from ennui and stir
the pulses--had it not already yielded dividends? Had it not already
very richly repaid him?

"See there, now!" he cried again, and gripped the rail with nervous
hands.

"Lord above!" ejaculated the major, squinting through his binoculars.

"Astonished, eh?" demanded the Master, smiling with malice. "Didn't
think it would work, did you? Well, which do you choose now,
Major--bullets or vibrations?"

"This--this is extraordinary!" exclaimed Bohannan. His glasses
traveled to and fro, sweeping the fringelike fan of the attackers,
still five or six miles away. "Faith, but this is--"

The binoculars lowered slowly, as Bohannan watched a falling plane.
Everywhere ahead there in the brazier of the dawn, as the two men
stood watching from the wind-lashed gallery of the on-roaring liner,
attackers were dropping. All along the line they had begun to fall,
like ripe fruit in a hurricane.

Not in bursts of flame did they go plunging down the depths, gyrating
like mad comets with long smoke-trailers and redly licking manes of
fire. Not in shattered fragments did they burst and plumb the a