could think more coolly and quickly than most humans.

Yet I did not stop running until I reached the cave. My heart gave a
great bound. For there, peering anxiously with worn face into the
growing dawn, stood the figure of Keston--my friend whom I had never
expected to see alive again.

"Meron!" he shouted. "Is it you--or your ghost?"

"The very question I was about to ask you," I parried. "But look, old
friend: see what your genius has accomplished--and is now destroying."

The mountain of ice was flowing forward, gathering speed on the way.
At an invisible signal, the massed machines--thousands on thousands of
them--started into action. Like shock troops in a last desperate
assault they ground forward, a serried line that exactly paralleled
the threatened break, and hundreds deep. This old earth of ours had
never witnessed so awe-inspiring a sight.

They smashed into that moving wall of ice with the force of uncounted
millions of tons. We could hear the groaning and straining of
furiously turning machinery as they heaved.

Keston and I looked at each other in amazement. The master machine
was trying to hold back the mighty Glacier by the sheer power of its
cohorts!

* * * * *

A wild light sprang into Keston's eye--of admiration, of regret. "What
a thing is this that I created!" he muttered. "If only--" I truly
believe that for a moment he half desired to see his brain-child
triumph.

The air was hideous with a thousand noises. The Glacier wall was
cracking and splitting with the noise of thunderclaps; the machines
were whirring and banging and crashing. It was a gallant effort!

But the towering ice wall was not to be denied. Forward, ever forward,
it moved, pushing inexorably the struggling machines before it, piling
them up high upon one another, grinding into powder the front ranks.

And to cap it all, the huge overhang, a thousand feet high, was
swaying crazily and describing ever greater arcs.

"Look!" I screamed and flung up my arm. Great freight planes were
flying wing-to-wing, head-on for the tottering crag--deliberately
smashing into the topmost point.

"Trying to knock it back into equilibrium!" said Keston, eyes ablaze,
dancing about insanely.

But the last suicidal push did not avail. With screams as of a
thousand devils and deafening rending roars, the whole side of the
Glacier seemed to lean over and fall in a great earth-shattering
crescendo of noise.