ves beneath his left thumb-nail.

Deeper and deeper it inched, accompanied by the soft breathing of the
man who guided it, until Chris felt one great sob of pain welling up
inside him, struggling to break past his lips; felt a tremendous urge
to writhe, to break away from the digging steel. His tongue seemed to
be trembling, shivering; but no other part of his body, not even the
smallest flicker of eyelash, betrayed him. At long last there came a
voice, sounding as if from miles away, and the disgust in it was very
good to Lieutenant Christopher Travers.

"Bah! It iss no use. His thick skull must be fractured. I could cut
him open and he would not awake. He might be conscious for minutes
after some hours--no, do not shoot him. I shall learn a few details
from him then. Throw him over there. Now--Zenalishin iss dead, but the
mask and cylinder on him should be returned to visibility. Well, we
will return him, too. Then, Kashtanov, to your instructions and your
work."

Hands gripped Chris's body. He felt himself thud against a wall, and
slumped into a heap, head lolling over. The cessation of pain was
sweet, though his thumb was raw, but sweeter still was the knowledge
that he had won the first tussle: that he was deemed to be harmlessly
unconscious for hours.

And carefully, through his lashes, he permitted himself a glimpse of
the room he lay in, and the men whom he had heard and felt but not yet
seen.

* * * * *

It seemed more like the belly of a submarine than a room, that maze of
tubes, levers, wheels, switchboards and queer metallic shapes; and the
blur cast upon his vision by barely raised eyelashes made it appear
doubly unreal and grotesque. It might have been another world.

Some of it was recognizable. A massive radio-telephone set, by which,
he judged, all communications between the fleets in the Pacific were
overheard; a squat dynamo; a set of huge cylinders, from which,
probably, had come the highly expansive gas that had snuffed out the
crews of the two dirigibles. But there were other things--strange,
monstrous. One of them, the tapered tube of metal that angled up to
the hut's ceiling, its base a mass of wheels and dials and tubing, was
evidently the weapon of the ray that had struck the scout down.

There were three men visible in the room, and Chris switched his
attention now to them.

Two were standing by a table in the center of the room, directly under
a shaf