carry no more than a short
distance out of the aperture.

* * * * *

Overhead, as we afterward learned, Tugh had overcome the guards in the
Power House by a surprise attack. Doubtless he struck them down with
the white-ray before they had time to realize he had attacked them.
Then he threw off the air-power transmitters and the lighting system.
The city, plunged into darkness and without the district air-power,
was isolated, cut off from the outside world. There was, in London, a
huge long-range projector with a vibratory ray which would derange the
internal mechanisms of the Robots: when news of the revolt and
massacre in New York had reached there, this projector was loaded into
an airliner, the _Micrad_. That vessel was now over the ocean, headed
for New York; but when Tugh cut off the power senders, the _Micrad_,
entering the New York District, was forced down to the ocean surface.
Now she was lying there helpless to proceed....

In the pit within the dam, Larry swam endlessly with Tina. He had
ceased his shouting.

"It's no use, Tina: there's no one to hear us. This is the end--for
us--Tina."

Yet, as she clung to him, and though Larry felt it was the end of this
life, it seemed only the beginning, for them, of something else.
Something, somewhere, for them together; something perhaps infinitely
better than this world could ever give them.

"But not--the end--Tina," he added. "The beginning--of our love."

An interminable interval....

"Quietly, Tina. You float. I can hold you up."

They were rats in a trap--swimming, until at the last, with all
strength gone, they would together sink out of this sodden muffled
blackness into the Unknown. But that Unknown shone before Larry now as
something--with Tina--perhaps very beautiful....

(_Concluded in the next issue_)

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[Illustration: The Readers' Corner]

_A meeting Place for Readers of_ Astounding Stories

_What Say Our Co-Editors?_

Dear Editor:

Since sending you "Manape the Mighty," I have read of a
Russian scientist who removed the brain from a dog and kept
both alive for some hours, which only goes to prove that
science outstrips the wildest dreams of the fictionist, and
a yarn that may be astounding and unusual when written, may
be commonplace, and the knowledge of the man in the street,
by the time the story goes to press. People read every day