hall with their
buttercup radiance. They were still and unwinking; not disks, I could
see now, but globes. Great and small, they floated motionless, their
rays extending rigidly and as still as the orb that shed them.

Yet rigid as they were there was nothing about either rays or orbs that
suggested either hardness or the metallic. They were vaporous, soft as
St. Elmo's fire, the witch lights that cling at times to the spars of
ships, weird gleaming visitors from the invisible ocean of atmospheric
electricity.

When they disappeared, as they did frequently, it was instantaneously,
completely, with a disconcerting sleight-of-hand finality. I noted,
though, that when they did vanish, immediately close to where they
had been other orbs swam forth with that same astonishing abruptness;
sometimes only one, larger it might be than that which had gone;
sometimes a cluster of smaller globes, their frozen, crocused rays
impinging.

What could they be, I wondered--how fixed, and what the source of
their light? Products of electro-magnetic currents and born of the
interpenetration of such streams flowing above us? Such a theory might
account for their disappearance, and reappearance, shiftings of the
flows that changed the light producing points of contact. Wireless
lights? If so here was an idea that human science might elaborate if
ever we returned to--

"Now which way?" Drake broke in upon my musing. The hall had ended. We
stood before a blank wall vanishing into the soft mists hiding the roof
of the chamber.

"I thought we had been going along the way They went," I said in
amazement.

"So did I," he answered. "We must have circled. They never went through
THAT unless--unless--" He hesitated.

"Unless what?" I asked sharply.

"Unless it opened and let them through," he said. "Have you forgotten
those great ovals--like cat's eyes that opened in the outer walls?" he
added quietly.

I HAD forgotten. I looked again at the wall. Certainly it was smooth,
lineless. In one unbroken, shining surface it rose, a facade of polished
metal. Within it the deep set points of light were duller even than they
had been in the pillars; almost indeed indistinguishable.

"Go on to the left," I said none too patiently. "And get that absurd
notion out of your head."

"All right." He flushed. "But you don't think I'm afraid, do you?"

"If what you're thinking were true, you'd have a right to be," I replied
tartly. "And I want to tell y