radio men come in here?"

They came, and for hours, while the other ultra-wave men searched the
apparently empty ether with their ineffective beams, the three technical
experts and the erstwhile Quartermaster's clerk labored upon a huge and
complex ultra-wave projector--the three blindly and with doubtful
questions; the one with sure knowledge at least of what he was trying to
do. Finally the thing was done, the crude, but efficient graduated
circles were set, and the tubes glowed redly as their massed output
drove into a tight beam of ultra-vibration.

"There it is, sir," Cleve reported, after some ten minutes of
manipulation, and the vast structure of the miniature world flashed into
being upon his plate. "You may notify the fleet--coordinates H 11.62, RA
124-31-16, and Dx about 173.2."

The report made and the assistants out of the room, the captain turned
to the observer and saluted gravely.

"We have always known, sir, that the Service had _men_; but I had no
idea that any one man could possibly do, on the spur of the moment,
what you have just done--unless that man happened to be Lyman
Cleveland."

"Oh, it doesn't...." the observer began, but broke off, muttering
unintelligibly at intervals; then swung the visiray beam toward the
Earth. Soon a face appeared upon the plate; the keen, but careworn face
of Virgil Samms!

"Hello, Lyman," his voice came clearly from the speaker, and the Captain
gasped--his ultra-wave observer and sometime clerk was Lyman Cleveland
himself, probably the greatest living expert in beam transmission! "I
knew that you'd do something, if it could be done. How about it--can the
others install similar sets on their ships? I'm betting that they
can't."

"Probably not," Cleveland frowned in thought. "This is a patchwork
affair, made of gunny sacks and hay-wire. I'm holding it together by
main strength and awkwardness, and even at that, it's apt to go to
pieces any minute."

"Can you rig it up for photography?"

"I think so. Just a minute--yes, I can. Why?"

"Because there's something going on out there that neither we nor
apparently the pirates know anything about. The Admiralty seems to think
that it's the Jovians again, but we don't see how it can be--if it is,
they have developed a lot of stuff that none of our agents has even
suspected," and he recounted briefly what Costigan had reported to him,
concluding: "Then there was a burst of interference--on the
_ultra-band_, mind you