wn
bodies?"

"Well," I chuckled, "they'll find that out soon enough when the first
interplanetary expedition tries to land on on of 'em!"

"Hmf!" grunted the medico. "That'll be the least of their troubles!"

"But you said the polarity couldn't be that of a magnet; then what?"

"Don't you remember the common pith ball of your high school physics
days? An accumulation of positive electricity repels an accumulation
of negative--if indeed we can correctly use 'accumulation' for a
negativity--and it is my idea that the earth is the container of a
gigantic accumulation of this meta--or hyper-electricity which we are
postulating; and our bodies contain a charge of the opposite sign."

"But, Doctor, the retention of a charge of static electricity by a
body in the presence of one of the opposite sign requires insulation
of the containing bodies; for instance, lightning is a breaking down
of the air insulation between the ground and a cloud. In our case we
are constantly in contact with the earth, and the charges would
equalize."

"Please bear in mind, Jim, that we are not talking about electricity
as now handled by man, but about some form of it as yet hypothetical.
We don't know what kind of insulation it would require. We may be
_constitutionally_ insulated."

"And you think the fire-ball broke down that insulation by the shock
to Tristan's system?" I asked. The logic of the thing was shaping up
hazily, but unmistakably. "But, then, why don't we frequently see
people kiting off the earth as the result of explosions?"

"_How do you know they haven't?_ Don't we have plenty of mysterious
disappearances as the result of explosions, and particularly,
strangely large numbers of missing in a major war?"

My blood chilled. The world was beginning to seem a pretty awful
place.

Grosnoff saw my disturbance, and placed a reassuring hand on my
shoulder.

"I'm afraid," he said, smiling, "that I rather yielded to the
temptation to get a rise out of you. That suggestion _might_ be
unpleasantly true under special circumstances. But I particularly have
an eye out for the special capacities of that weird and rare
phenomenon, the fire-ball. It isn't impossible that the energy of the
fire-ball went into the re-polarization rather than into a destructive
concussion--hence Tristan's escape."

"You mean its effect is _qualitatively_ different from that of any
other explosion?"

"It may be so. It is known to be an electric conglome