nything!--to check the monster, to flatten out
the onrushing mountain! The red bottom-plates of a submarine freighter
came rolling up behind the surge to show how futile was the might of
man. And the next moment marked the impact of the wall of water upon a
widespread area of landing roofs, where giant letters stared mockingly
at him to spell the words: Harkness Terminals, New York.

He saw the silent crumbling of great buildings; he glimpsed in one
wild second the whirling helicopters on giant freighters that took the
air too late; he saw them vanish as the sea swept in and engulfed
them. And then, after endless minutes, he knew that Chet had swung
again above the site of his plant, and he saw the stumps of steel and
twisted wreckage that remained....

* * * * *

The pilot hung the ship in air--a golden beetle, softly humming as it
hovered above the desolate scene. Chet had switched on the steady buzz
of the stationary-ship signal, and the wireless warning was swinging
passing craft out and around their station. Within the quiet cabin a
man stood to stare and stare, unspeaking, until his pilot laid a
friendly hand upon the broad shoulders.

"You're cleaned," said Chet Bullard. "It's a washout! But you'll build
it up again; they can't stop you--"

But the steady, appraising eyes of Walter Harkness had moved on and on
to a rippling stretch of water where land had been before.

"Cleaned," he responded tonelessly; "and then some! And I could start
again, but--" He paused to point to the stretch of new sea, and his
lips moved that he might laugh long and harshly. "But right there is
all I own--that is, the land I bought this morning. It is gone, and I
owe twenty million to the hardest-hearted bunch of creditors in the
world. That foreign crowd, who've been planning to invade our
territory here. You know what chance I'll have with them...."

The disaster was complete, and Walter Harkness was facing it--facing
it with steady gray eyes and a mind that was casting a true balance of
accounts. He was through, he told himself; his other holdings would be
seized to pay for this waste of water that an hour before had been dry
land; they would strip him of his last dollar. His lips curved into a
sardonic smile.

"June twentieth, nineteen seventy-three," he repeated. "Poor old
Warrington! He called this my lucky day!"

* * * * *

The pilot had respected the othe