om all
this hateful conventional society--"

"We can go to their office--it's only five minutes. The chap that
operates the machine for the company is a pal of mine. He's not supposed
to take passengers except between the offices they have scattered about
the world. But I know his weak point--"

Eric laughed, fumbled with a hidden spring under his desk. A small
polished object, gleaming silvery, slid down into his hand.

"Old friendship, _plus_ this, would make him--like spinach."

* * * * *

Five minutes later Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding and his pretty wife were in
street clothes, light silk tunics of loose, flowing lines--little
clothing being required in the artificially warmed city. They entered an
elevator and dropped thirty stories to the ground floor of the great
building.

There they entered a cylindrical car, with rows of seats down the sides.
Not greatly different from an ancient subway car, except that it was
air-tight, and was hurled by magnetic attraction and repulsion through a
tube exhausted of air, at a speed that would have made an old subway
rider gasp with amazement.

In five more minutes their car had whipped up to the base of another
building, in the business section, where there was no room for parks
between the mighty structures that held the unbroken glass roofs two
hundred stories above the concrete pavement.

An elevator brought them up a hundred and fifty stories. Eric led Nada
down a long, carpeted corridor to a wide glass door, which bore the
words:

COSMIC EXPRESS

stenciled in gold capitals across it.

As they approached, a lean man, carrying a black bag, darted out of an
elevator shaft opposite the door, ran across the corridor, and entered.
They pushed in after him.

They were in a little room, cut in two by a high brass grill. In front
of it was a long bench against the wall, that reminded one of the
waiting room in an old railroad depot. In the grill was a little window,
with a lazy, brown-eyed youth leaning on the shelf behind it. Beyond him
was a great, glittering piece of mechanism, half hidden by the brass. A
little door gave access to the machine from the space before the grill.

The thin man in black, whom Eric now recognized as a prominent French
heart-specialist, was dancing before the window, waving his bag
frantically, raving at the sleepy boy.

"Queek! I have tell you zee truth! I have zee most urgent