here was a flash of intolerably vivid
blue-green light. It came from the chasm below the Navajo Dam. The
lights across the dam's curving crest went out. The street-lights of
Bluevale and the little village of Navajo Dam went out. The world went
dark, while a mountainous blue-green flame shed intolerably bright light
toward the stars.

It went out, too.

Soames, cold with fear, pressed the end of the sensory device. He felt
pain, lancing, excruciating pain. He heard Fran's voice gasping
hopelessly:

"_Try! Try! Try!_"

He felt Fran's body turn in pain, and he saw that Fran's eyes looked up
at stars, and the stars were cut off at one side by the curving bulk of
the monstrous concrete dam.

Soames shook hands with himself. He let go the button. He started the
motorcycle. He raced toward the dam. He did not again press on the
sensory device until he'd gone frantically through the village and
hair-raisingly down the truck-road to the generator buildings. There he
cut off the motor, and he heard men's voices, profane and agitated and
alarmed. He saw the small flickerings of flashlights.

He found Fran, crumpled on the ground and trying desperately not to make
sounds of pain. Soames knew where the hurt was. He'd experienced it as
Fran did. He'd guessed its cause and seriousness. He knew he had to move
quickly.

He put Fran swiftly on the saddle behind his own on the motorcycle. He
gave the motorcycle all the gas it would take and went racketing up the
truck-road from the chasm below the dam.

He made it. The motorcycle, its lights turned off, was across the dam
and streaking for the first curve beyond before the flickerings of car
headlights began to show on the road from Bluevale.

Fran held on fiercely. But presently Soames felt the quiverings behind
him. He stopped the motorcycle where the road was empty. Fran ground his
teeth and stared at him defiantly in the reflected light of the now
functioning single headlight.

"If I were you," said Soames, not expecting to be understood, but
speaking as one man to another, "If I were you I wouldn't be ashamed of
crying. I feel pretty much like it myself, from relief that your
signalling device blew out."

CHAPTER 9

The color of the blue-green flame which had flared so fiercely outside
the generator-buildings was no mystery at all. It was the color of
vaporized copper, the same coloring found in burning driftwood in which
copper nails have rusted. Its cause