t you said you _had_!"

"Only approximately, your Excellency. One cannot be positive, but within
a reasonable distance----" He paused.

"What do you call a reasonable distance? I supposed your physics was an
exact science!" retorted the general.

"But the data----"

"What do you call a reasonable distance?" bellowed the Imperial
Commissioner.

"A hundred kilometres!" suddenly shouted the overwrought professor,
losing control of himself. "I won't be talked to this way, do you hear?
I won't! How can a man think? I'm a member of the faculty of the
Imperial University. I've been decorated twice--twice!"

"Fiddlesticks!" returned the general, amused in spite of himself. "Don't
be absurd. I merely wish you to hurry. Have a cigar?"

"Oh, your Excellency!" protested the professor, now both ashamed and
frightened. "You must excuse me. The war has shattered my nerves. May I
smoke? Thank you."

"Sit down. Take your time," said Von Helmuth, looking out and up at a
monoplane descending toward the landing in slowly lessening spirals.

"You see, your Excellency," explained Von Schwenitz, "the data are
fragmentary, but I used three methods, each checking the others."

"The first?" shot back the general. The monoplane had landed safely.

"I compared the records of all the seismographs that had registered the
earthquake wave attendant on the electrical discharges accompanying the
great yellow auroras of July. These shocks had been felt all over the
globe, and I secured reports from Java, New Guinea, Lima, Tucson,
Greenwich, Algeria, and Moscow. These showed the wave had originated
somewhere in Eastern Labrador."

"Yes, yes. Go on!" ordered the general.

"In the second place, the violent magnetic storms produced by the helium
aurora appear to have left their mark each time upon the earth in a
permanent, if slight, deflection of the compass needle. The earth's
normal magnetic field seems to have had superimposed upon it a new field
comprised of lines of force nearly parallel to the equator. My
computations show that these great circles of magnetism centre at
approximately the same point in Labrador as that indicated by the
seismographs--about fifty-five degrees north and seventy-five degrees
west."

The general seemed struck with this.

"Permanent deflection, you say!" he ejaculated.

"Yes, apparently permanent. Finally the barometer records told the same
story, although in less precise form. A compressional wave of air