a tremendous
overload.

Joan cried out in awful despair and moved to follow, but her knees
gave way beneath her. Moaning and shuddering, she slumped into Bert's
arms and he drew her back from the awful heat of the force area.

Then, horrified, they watched as Tom Parker melted into the misty
shape of the Bardek war machine. Swiftly his body merged with the
half-substance of the tank and became an integral part of the mass.
For a horrible instant Tom, too, was transparent--a ghost shape
writhing in a ghostly throbbing mechanism of another world. His own
atomic structure mingled with that of the alien thing and yet, for a
moment, he retained his Earthly form. His lean face was peaceful in
death, satisfied, like the Wanderer's when they had last seen him.

A terrific thunderclap rent the air and a column of flame roared up
from the force area. Tom's apparatus glowed to instant white heat,
then melted down into sizzling liquid metal and glass. The laboratory
was in sudden twilight gloom, save for the tongue of fire that licked
up from the force area to the paneled ceiling. On the metal disk, now
glowing redly, was no visible thing. The gateway was closed forever.

* * * * *

What more fearful calamity might have befallen had the machine been
switched off instead, Bert was never to know. Nor did he know how he
reached his parked flivver with Joan a limp sobbing bundle in his
arms. He only knew that Tom Parker's sacrifice had saved them, had
undoubtedly prevented a horrible invasion of Earth; and that the
efforts of the Wanderer had not been in vain.

The old house was burning furiously when he climbed in under the wheel
of his car. He held Joan very close and watched that blazing funeral
pyre in wordless sorrow as the bereaved girl dropped her head to his
shoulder.

A group of men came up the winding road, a straggling group,
running--the loungers from the village. In the forefront was the
beardless youth who had directed Bert, and, bringing up the rear,
limping and scurrying, was the old man they had called Gramp. He was
puffing prodigiously when the others gathered around the car,
demanding information.

And the old fellow with the thick spectacles talked them all down.

"What'd I tell you?" he screeched. "Didn't I say they was queer doin's
up here? Didn't I say the devil was here with his imps--an' the
thunder? You're a passel o' idjits like I said--"

The roar of Bert's starti