eath of dawn and along the horizon glowed a band of pure
gold where the sun would soon rise. When he had walked some thirty
yards from the laboratory Fraser paused. With his toe he touched a
spring in the platform. A trap door instantly yawned at our feet. I
suppressed a start just in time, but through my body shot a thrill of
fear. My muscles tensed. My heart raced. What now? Where could a trap
door, two thousand feet above the earth lead? Was he going to shove us
into space because we refused to answer his questions?

"Go down," Fraser ordered.

* * * * *

For the space of a breath we hesitated. To disobey meant certain and
instant death at the hands of this soulless maniac. But to obey--to
drop through this trap-door--also meant death. I took a step forward.
Could we overpower him? But what if we did? There were others here
beside Fraser. How many others I had no idea, but surely enough to
make things impossible for Foulet and me. Yet we dared not even
hesitate. To hesitate implied thinking--and a man robbed of his brain
cannot think! There was no way out. Together Foulet and I stepped to
the brink of the yawning hole....

For an instant we were almost blinded by a glare of rosy light that
seemed to burst upon us from the earth so far below. Here was the
source of that strange afterglow! Away beneath us, evidently on the
sands of the Arabian desert, glowed four red eyes sending forth the
rosy rays that converged at the center of the floating platform.
Instantly I comprehended Fraser's scheme. The Fleotite he had
invented, and of which the platform and buildings were made, was
lighter than air. It followed, therefore, that if it were not anchored
in some way it would instantly rise. So Fraser had anchored it with
four of his magnetic rays! He had told us that he could regulate the
pulling power of the ray, so what he had obviously done was to
calculate to a nicety the lift of the Fleotite against the magnetism
of the rays.

But instantaneously with this thought came another. Fraser was urging
us into the glow of the magnetic ray! If once our bodies came entirely
within the ray we would be yanked from the platform and dashed to
death--sucked to destruction on the sands below.

In my ear I heard Fraser's fiendish chuckle. "The instinct of fear
still holds, eh? My serum can destroy your conscious mind--but not
your native fear? Cowards! Fools! But I am not going to push you off.
Loo