d handle it
on a large scale we could do anything with it--destroy the world, drive
a car against gravity off into space, shift the axis of the earth
perhaps!"

It came to Thornton as he sat there, cigarette in hand, that poor Bennie
Hooker was going to receive the disappointment of his life. Within the
next five minutes his dreams would be dashed to earth, for he would
learn that another had stepped down to the pool of discovery before him.
For how many years, he wondered, had Bennie toiled to produce his
mysterious ray that should break down the atom and release the store of
energy that the genii of Nature had concealed there. And now Thornton
must tell him that all his efforts had gone for nothing!

"And you believe that any one who could generate a ray such as you
describe could control the motion of the earth?" he asked.

"Of course, certainly," answered Hooker. "He could either disintegrate
such huge quantities of matter that the mass of the earth would be
shifted and its polar axis be changed, or if radioactive
substances--pitchblende, for example--lay exposed upon the earth's
surface he could cause them to discharge their helium and other products
at such an enormous velocity that the recoil or reaction would
accelerate or retard the motion of the globe. It would be quite
feasible, quite simple--all one would need would be the disintegrating
ray."

And then Thornton told Hooker of the flight of the giant Ring machine
from the north and the destruction of the Mountains of Atlas through the
apparent instrumentality of a ray of lavender light. Hooker's face
turned slightly pale and his unshaven mouth tightened. Then a smile of
exaltation illuminated his features.

"He's done it!" he cried joyously. "He's done it on an engineering
scale. We pure-science dreamers turn up our noses at the engineers, but
I tell you the improvements in the apparatus part of the game come when
there is a big commercial demand for a thing and the engineering chaps
take hold of it. But _who_ is he and _where_ is he? I must get to him. I
don't suppose I can teach him much, but I've got a magnificent
experiment that we can try together."

He turned to a littered writing-table and poked among the papers that
lay there.

"You see," he explained excitedly, "if there is anything in the quantum
theory----Oh! but you don't care about that. The point is where _is_ the
chap?"

And so Thornton had to begin at the beginning and tell Hooker