scouting before we
came back; see what was happening over the rest of the world. We were
returning from one of those little expeditions, cruising about fifty
miles up, when we almost bumped into the diskoid. We saw them first;
we had just come out of the shadow of the Earth; they were in the sun.
I let them have it before they had a chance to turn on their rays. The
bullets punctured them clean; must have let out their air. I didn't
wait to see; ducked back into the shadow again."

"How did you get here in the nick of time?" asked Hilary suddenly. "A
few minutes later and there would have been no rescue."

Wat looked, at him in some surprise.

"Why, we got your signal, of course."

"Signal?" Hilary echoed. "I never--" Then he paused. Morgan was
grinning sheepishly, "Here, what do you know about this?" he queried
sharply.

* * * * *

The giant's grin widened. "Just a little," he admitted. "I'd been
playing around with my transmitter. Used some of the spare equipment
we had cached for the _Vagabond_, and stepped up the sending radius to
a thousand miles or so."

"We received your call in the woods north of Lake Ontario," Joan
interrupted.

Grim nodded, gratified. "I thought it might work," he rumbled. "You
see," he explained to Hilary, "ever since I heard about that diskoid,
I _knew_ that the _Vagabond_ was responsible. But you refused to
believe it. So I worked in secret, rigging up the apparatus. Didn't
want to stir up false hopes. I finished it yesterday. When we were
discovered, I started sending."

"It took us just ten minutes over the hour to get here from a standing
start," Wat boasted. "We almost burned up the old machine smashing
through the air, didn't we Joan?"

She nodded happily from her cozy position in the crook of Hilary's
arm.

Hilary looked long and steadily at his friends.

"Well--" he finally began, when someone cried out sharply.

A dark shape shot over the rim of the mountainside, swooped down at
them in one fierce lunge. Involuntarily the Earthmen threw themselves
flat on the ground to avoid the tremendous rush of its flight. At one
hundred feet it banked sharply, a circle of light gleamed, and a long
blazing streamer thrust its relentless finger at the prostrate figures
of the Earthmen.

There was a blinding flash, a roar. Hilary was on his feet, bullets
spitting rapidly. But already the lone Mercutian flier had completed
his bank, and was zooming