nitely interrelated and
dependent one upon the other for the existence of matter in any form
whatsoever. You see--but here we are."

* * * * *

The motors slowed down and a titanic page seemed to turn over in the
cosmos with a vanishing blaze of magnificence. Directly beneath them
glowed the disk of blue-white light that was Tom's force area. The
sphere swooped down within its influence and came to rest.

"Make haste," the Wanderer said. "I shall be here in the gateway
though you see me not. Bring them here, speedily."

On the one side Bert saw familiar objects in Tom's laboratory, on the
other side the white cliff and the pitchy sea of the Bardek realm. And
the cage of basket-weave between, with his friends inside struggling
with the spider men. It was the instant after the capture.

"Joan! Tom!" Bert shouted.

A side of the sphere had opened and he plunged through and into the
Bardek plane--to the inky surface of the sea, fully expecting to sink
in its forbidding depths. But the stuff was an elastic solid, springy
under his feet and bearing him up as would an air-inflated cushion. He
threw himself upon the cage and tore at it with his fingers.

The whimpering screams of the spider men were in his ears, and he saw
from the corner of his eye that other of the tortoiselike mounds were
rising up out of the viscid black depths, dozens of them, and that
hundreds of the Bardeks were closing in on him from all directions.
Weapons were in their hands, and a huge engine of warfare like a
caterpillar tractor was skimming over the sea from the cliff wall with
a great grinding and clanking of its mechanisms.

But the cage was pulling apart in his clutches as if made of reeds.
With Joan in one encircling arm he was battling the spider men,
driving swift short-arm jabs into their soft bloated bodies with
devastating effect. And Tom, recovering from the first surprise of his
capture, was doing a good job himself, his flailing arms scattering
the Bardeks like ninepins. The Wanderer and his sphere, both doomed to
material existence only in infra-dimensional space, had vanished from
sight.

A bedlam rose up from the reinforcing hordes as they came in to enter
the force area. But Bert sensed the guiding touch of the Wanderer's
unseen hand, heard his placid voice urging him, and, in a single wild
leap was inside the sphere with the girl.

With Joan safely in the Wanderer's care, he rushed out aga